


Tom Riddle and the League of Interhouse Friendship

by Drakey



Series: Luke Restimen and The Cruelty of Fate [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Childhood Trauma, HP: Epilogue Compliant, Horcrux Malfunction, Original Character(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-23
Updated: 2013-08-23
Packaged: 2017-12-24 09:44:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 48,719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/938482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Drakey/pseuds/Drakey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Luke Restimen was born to muggle parents not too terribly long after Harry Potter sacrificed himself in the Forbidden Forest, and Luke's soul picked up an unwanted passenger: the fragment of Voldemort's soul that was stuck to Harry Potter.</p>
<p>At eleven years old, Luke gets his Hogwarts letter, and discovers that in a world where basically everything is weird, Luke is weirder than anyone else.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. I'm a What, Now?

**Author's Note:**

> As this is a NaNoWriMo story from 2010, there's been only minimal copyediting. For your convenience, I'm breaking it up into four or five chunks.  
> I did a lot of referring to the HP wiki, but mostly I went off of the books. The location of the Hufflepuff common room is wrong if you do the research, but as far as I know, Rowling didn't give any information about it until 2011. Because I started this in 2010, that's about as up-to-date as my information gets. Dang Rowling won't stop dang saying dang stuff.

He died in the woods. Ripped away from his body, sent spinning into the night and twirling off to nowhere until the echoing, silent, brilliant darkness tormented him to sleep. He woke up to bright lights, sliding out into the world. He didn't know who he was. All he knew was a flash of green light, and a scream, and his mother was gone, because he had killed her. The doctor slapped him and he drew breath again.

 

“Luke?”

“Yes, mum?”

Annalee Restimen popped her head into the kitchen and peered at her son's plate. Microwaved pizza bagels. Health food. “There's an owl on the balcony.”

Luke stared at her for a moment.

“An owl, mum?”

“An owl.”

“it's the middle of the day.”

“Really? I hadn't noticed.”

“Couldn't you shoo it away,” Luke said quietly.

She blew out a long, slow sigh. “I could. I just don't know if it would do any good. He's got a couple of friends across the street. But he also seems to be holding an envelope.”

Luke nodded slowly. It was entirely possibly that she had just gone mad and he would have to call the police, in which case he should probably have a plan. He stood up, grabbed a fork from the silverware drawer—it was also possible that there was a wild animal on the balcony. “What do you want me to do about it,” Luke asked.

“I think the envelope is addressed to you,” his mum replied.

Luke nodded. Two points in favor of the mum-is-crazy theory. He gripped the fork a little tighter. “I'll go check it out,” he said.

He stepped out to the back bedroom, through the door to the little wooden balcony that looked out over the slightly unkempt grounds. He opened it. An owl hooted at him.

“Huh.”

“I told you.”

Luke bent down and took the envelope from the owl—it was held in its beak—and peered at it for a few moments.

Luke Restimen  
The Kitchen, Unit 12  
2143 Manor Road, Stoughton

“All right, then, two points in favor of Mum's-not-mad.” He opened the envelope and pulled out a paper. And then, he began to laugh. Luke shooed the owl away and slipped back inside.

“You will not believe this one,” he declared.

His mother looked up. “Oh?”

Luke tossed the letter down onto the kitchen table and rolled his eyes. “Whoever these pranksters are, they have entirely too much time on their hands. Look at this.”  
She picked up the letter and started reading, and one eyebrow slowly clambered into the stratosphere.

Luke Restimen,

(the letter ran)

Congratulations on your acceptance into Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry! Thanks to our new owl-reply system, you will be able to respond to this letter and ask for help should you be unfamiliar with the wizarding world in Britain and the surrounding areas for any reason. Simply return the attached form to the owl which delivered this letter and you will be provided with whatever assistance you have indicated the need of within two business days.  
As you may be aware, all young witches and wizards will require a wand for their schooling, as well as the following textbooks:

-Hogwarts: A History (twenty-seventh edition) by Professor Garino Pestinwal  
-One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi by Phillida Spore  
-The Standard Book of Spells (Grade One) by Miranda Goshawk  
-In the Shadows of the World by Edward J. Printle  
-A Beginner's Guide to Transfiguration by Emeric Switch  
-The Potionmaker's Pal (twelfth edition) by Mortimer Flaco

Additionally, new students will need school robes, a standard size 3 cauldron, a quill,

and at that point Luke's mother began to laugh.

“Oh,” she managed in between giggles, “that is rich. I haven't had a good laugh like that in ages. Since before your... well. Uh... hand me that form.”

Luke handed her the attached page and she read over it, chuckling.

“And some of these words they've come up with. Muggle, quidditch—actually, isn't that a town somewhere up north? Quidditch? It sounds like it could be.” she sighed as the joke wore thin and got up and headed back to her bedroom. She stopped short at the door.

“Oh, um... didn't you ever get rid of that owl?”

“Of course I did,” Luke replied. “Why? Is he back?

“He is,” she said. Luke's mother turned around, grinning. “They've actually gone and trained an owl. I suppose he's got to get the form back. Well, I guess I'll give it to him.”  
She strode over to the table and grabbed the form and a pencil. After a moment's thought, she scrawled “This is entirely too much effort for a joke” across the back of the form and stuffed it into the envelope, which she returned to the owl. The owl flew away, and that, aside from a liberal application of references to the whole ridiculous affair throughout the rest of the day, was that.

At least, it was until the knock on the door the next morning. It was a persistent sort of a knock, the kind that tells the listener that the knocker plans on staying through the night if they really have to, and it would really be easier for everyone involved just to open the door.

Annalee Restimen, not being the rude type, and not having far to go to the door anyways, answered it almost before the man on the other side had finished knocking.  
He was short and thin, and the way he stood suggested that he was ready to put his foot in the door at the first sign of trouble.

“Hello,” he said, “My name is Jonathan Westcott, and I'll start right off by saying that I know you didn't request my presence per se, but you obviously didn't know that the letter was real, so I'm here anyways. I hope this isn't a bad time.” there was a long silence, and Mister Westcott gradually began to turn red. “This is,” he said hopefully, “Unit 12, 2143 Manor Road, correct?”

“Yes,” Mrs. Restimen said. “It is.”

He nodded. Somehow, this wasn't going at all the way he'd hoped, and he was beginning to wonder if muggles, perhaps, usually brought cookies when they visited others. “I... I'm afraid I haven't got any cookies,” he ventured, and when this brought only a blank look from the woman at the door, he said, “You did get a letter about Hogwarts yesterday, didn't you?”

She slammed the door.

Mister Westcott said “ouch,” but the door didn't latch closed, and in fact it didn't get all the way to the doorjamb, if only because it had, instead, gotten all the way to his foot.  
“I'm terribly sorry,” he continued on, muffled by the door, “ and I know you must be quite confused by all this, but most parents are delighted when they learn their son is a wizard, and we've not had the owl-reply system set up for very long, so I really don't know what to say to--”

She slammed the door on his foot again. “Get out!” she snapped.

“Oh,” Mister Westcott murmured, “I've gone and made a mess of things. Will you please just hear me out, I promise not to come in the door unless you invite me.”  
Annalee opened the door slowly, revealing Mister Westcott, now looking somewhat pained and holding up what was, by all appearances, a plain wooden dowel. “Mrs. Restimen,” he said, “I am a wizard. And I can prove it. Look, see...” he pointed his dowel at the ceiling and mumbled something that sounded like it was trying to be Latin, and a bouqet of flowers appeared from the end of the wand. He handed them over.

“I suppose,” Annalee said, “that I am supposed to be impressed. It's obviously a trick wand, you had those hidden in there somehow. I've seen much more impressive tricks.”

Westcott sighed and tapped the front door with his wand. Slowly, the peeling paint repaired itself and shifted colors, going from a dull, unimpressive white to a bright, cheerful yellow. He tapped the door again and it turned a riotous green, chasing the yellow, and a third tap spread a wave of blue across the door. A fourth and final tap sent a field of red rushing to follow the other colors.

Annalee let him in.

“I'll go and get Luke,” she said. “He's still asleep.”

“No, I'm not. You shouted, Mummsy.” Luke was standing at the door to his little bedroom, staring at Mister Westcott. “How did you do that?” he asked.

Westcott grinned. “Magic,” he said as Annalee closed the door.

“Right,” Luke replied. “If you don't want to tell me, don't tell me. I'm eleven, not six.”

Poor Mister Westcott was feeling rather discouraged by now, but he still had a few tricks up his sleeve. “To be more precise,” he said, “I used Decker's Repainting Charm. The flowers were created by floramenta, a personal favorite of mine, before you ask.”

Luke nodded. “Right. Okay. So how did you get in and do whatever you did to our door last night? Or whenever.”

“I'm afraid you don't understand, Luke. You're a wizard. Haven't you ever done anything you couldn't explain?”

“Algebra,” Luke ventured. “Oh, and I tried to eat a really hot pepper once. I couldn't explain that to you if I tried.”

Westcott rubbed the bridge of his nose and sighed. “I'm going to do a bit of magic here,” he said. “Something you can't deny is magic.” He closed his eyes and tapped his nose with his wand. Westcott's flesh started shifting, running together, and changing shape until, with a miniscule squishy sound, his nose settled on a new, decidedly more equine appearance.

Luke leaned against the wall as Mister Westcott forced his nose to resume its normal shape, and then, as though he hadn't just undergone a rather unsettling transformation, he took a bow. “All right,” Luke said. “Let's say I believe you. What happens now?”

\------------

“And then I just tap these three bricks like so,” Mister Westcott said, tapping on three bricks in the little yard behind the Leaky Cauldron (which had seemed a very seedy place to Luke), “And the wall opens up into Diagon Alley.”

And indeed the wall was opening up, the bricks rearranging themselves and the air behind them somewhat mysteriously not full of London, but rather full of... somewhere else. Men, women, and children in robes of all colors bustled about, talking with each other and going in and out of brightly colored shops. The most garish of the little buildings was currently bedecked in bright, bright red, and covered in big, pink signs declaring the virtues of something called a “bigmy puff”. Luke was unimpressed with that particular storefront, preferring instead to look around at the more practical-looking shops.

“I think your first stop should be Gringotts, of course,” Westcott said, “But it's entirely up to you, Mrs. Restimen.”

Luke's mother considered this for a moment and then set off at a brisk pace for the end of the alley, trailing her son and her guide behind her. “Gringotts is that bank you mentioned, right?”

“Yes, it is,” Mister Westcott said. He looked as though he might want to say more, but Annalee was off and almost at a run in her enthusiasm.

“And all this has been right here in London this whole time? It's marvelous!”

Luke, for his part, thought it was a touch garish. Any comment he might have made on that matter, however, was lost as he got a good look at Gringotts and asked, rather pointedly, “Who stepped on this building?”

Mister Westcott gave him a very startled look at that and Luke was asked to kindly not speak while he was in the bank as he might inadvertently offend the goblins (it really wasn't their fault that they weren't very good architects, after all, and really, they'd done their best, but goblins have some odd ideas about ownership and they hadn't wanted the bank to belong to the wizards and blah blah blah, it was all really a bit of a lecture).

They came out of the bank short several dozen pounds and with a much more compact forty galleons, little gold coins that Luke thought looked much more valuable than the value they had been assigned by the goblins in the bank. The next stop was, Mister Westcott announced with some chagrin, Dallas's.

“You know,” he said, “I don't quite trust that Dallas woman. Back in my day, you got your wands from Ollivander, and that was that. But of course, he was getting on in years, keeled over on his workbench two years ago, doing what he loved. Damn shame, really, that Dallas woman has about ten years on him, the way I hear it, but she looks... well, you'll see. It's not natural, is the point. And those wands she makes... I know they're supposed to be really good, with those fancy seals on the wood and the charms and the magical cores, but honestly, buffalo hair? Is that any way to make a wand? It's a ruddy great cow, is what a buffalo is. I mean, sasquatch, I could respect, or even pono at a stretch, but a buffalo is a cow!”

This rant lasted them until the door of the shop, which wasn't far from the bank. They slipped inside and were greeted by a cloud of dust and a muffled obscenity.  
“I swear, if I find one more... oh, was that the door? Someone's in here?” The voice had an American accent, and the woman who popped her head out of a back room looked like the picture an artist comissioned to paint 1952 might come up with. She was perky, with a bright smile and a slightly mischevious look in her eye, as though, given another ten years, she'd be burning bras with the rest of the feminists. “Well, hello there,” she said. “Welcome to Dallas's. I suppose you'll be wanting a wand today, then?”  
Luke nodded and she stepped forward around the counter. She was wearing a red and white checkered dress. She looked about forty. Ollivander must not have been very healthy. “Yes ma'am,” Luke said. Something about the woman was very impressive, and he wasn't sure what it was. She wasn't exactly imposing, and although her prematurely gray hair added a certain aura of wisdom to her, it was counterbalanced very neatly by the style of the mane, which reminded him forcefully of a Betty wig.

She looked him over and made a few approving noises. “A healthy child, to be sure, well fed, though not excessively so. About middling height... let's see... what's your name?”

“Luke, ma'am,” Luke replied.

She grinned. “Oh, I have a friend who'd have a field day with that, you know. My name's Joy. Used to be Jessica, but that was a little over ninety years ago now. Let me think. Luke... Luke Luke Luke. Ah.” She bustled—the way she moved could really be described no better than that—over to one of the many shelves adorning the wall and peered at each of the boxes in turn until she pulled one out and handed it to Luke. “Try this,” she said. “Go ahead, give it a swing.”

He opened the box and pulled out a wand, about ten inches long and extremely shiny, except for what looked like a burn at one end. He swung it. Joy's hair caught fire. After she had put it out, she calmly took back the wand and tilted her head to one side as she stared at him. “Middle name?”

“Dennis.”

Before Luke could ask why she needed his middle name, Joy had handed him another wand. He swung it. Something fell over in the back of the shop.

“Right,” Joy said.

“If you'll excuse my asking, ma'am,” Luke said while Joy stood tapping her foot and contemplating how to fit him to a wand, “how old are you really?”

“Luke!” his mother exclaimed, but a raised hand from Joy pushed her into silence.

“It's a good question, actually. I turn one hundred and seven this December.”

“You don't look a day over forty,” Luke said. Somewhere deep inside, he was jealous. “Are you immortal?”

Joy grinned. “Yes I am. It's not an easy thing to accomplish, though, and I wouldn't recommend it. I'm just a little too afraid of death. A bit ironic, really.”

“How?” Luke asked.

Joy smiled. “I'm already dead, in a way. I've just kind of... hit the pause button on life. Watch carefully, and you'll notice I don't breathe.” She seemed lost in thought for a moment, and then she stood up. “I think I may have just the wand for you. It's actually a replica of a rather more famous one, but all my wands work.” She pulled a wand from deep in the recesses of her dress, screwed up her face in concentration for a moment, and declared, authoritatively, “accio replica wand.” A box zipped across the shop and crashed into the wall behind Joy. She had to dodge its almost murderously fast flight. “Oh, shitnuggets,” she said calmly. “Be a dear, Luke, and pick that up, will you?”

Luke bent down to pick up the fallen box and its spilled contents. As soon as he touched the wand, a feeling of warmth spread up his arm. Joy chuckled. “Yep, I thought so. Give it a swing, it looks like it likes you, but let's be sure.”

Luke swung it, and a little arc of green sparks trailed from the end. “Abra Cadabra,” he muttered quietly, a little joke to himself. A single, bright green rose popped out of the end of the wand and fell limply to the floor.

“Whoah now, there, partner,” Joy said. “Hold back on the incantations, will ya? And never, ever, ever mispronounce that. Never.” She directed a long, searching stare at him and sighed. “I suppose, in the interest of full disclosure, that I should tell you the wand that's a model of did some right nasty things. If you want a different one, I can get you a different one.” When Luke shook his head, Joy shrugged. “All right then, just remember. That wand is thirteen and one half inches, made of yew, with a phoenix feather core. It was harder'n hell to find a phoenix, and even harder to get a feather, so try to not break it. And before you ask, yes, you do need to remember what your wand is made of, there's competitions where it matters.” Almost as an afterthought, she added, “and that'll be six galleons.”

As they walked out of the wand shop, Mister Westcott seemed to be suppressing a shudder. Luke, on the other hand, was thrilled. “Immortal, can you believe it? I mean, really immortal, like an elf or something!”

“Oh no,” Mister Westcott said, “elfs generally only live to about a hundred and fifty, at the most. Of course, if they're freed and can't find employment, it's quite a bit shorter, since they generally go mad and stop eating...” he trailed off as he realized that Luke was staring at him. “Of course, you may not be referring specifically to house elfs, in which case all bets are off, as it were.”

“Anyways,” Luke said, “I think it's cool.”

The rest of the day was purchasing books and robes and supplies. A large sign on one of the storefronts advertised that they were now stocking “muggle-style paper”, which Luke found very amusing.

Once all the serious purchases were made, the forty galleons that they had started out with were reduced to six galleons, twelve sickles, and thirteen knuts, which Luke thought was very confusing. The decimal system, after all, existed for a reason. His mother seemed to think that the best thing to do with all that money was to go and visit the brightly colored store that had assaulted their eyes on the way in. Luke trailed dejectedly after her, not entirely keen on walking into a place so rich in primary colors and pink signs. As soon as he entered, his worst fears were confirmed when he was confronted by a table covered in garish, pink furballs about the size of his head. Naturally, his mother went straight for them.

“Oh,” she said, “these things are adorable. Are they alive, Mister Westcott?”

Westcott sighed. “Yes, they are. Those are the bigmy puffs they were advertising outside. I'm afraid they're rather expensive, though, and wizarding law says they can't be kept in a home where they might be seen by muggles.”

She cast a rather sad look at the table and left it behind only reluctantly. One of the puffs was vibrating enthusiastically towards her, as though to request a pat on the head—wherever that might be.

She led them around the shop for the better part of half an hour, stopping once in a while to coo over the merchandise or exclaim at some marvel or another. At one point, the shop's owner, a broad smile in a blue robe who went by the name of George, stopped to say hello to her and convinced her to buy a jigsaw puzzle that changed its picture every week. At the moment, it was a picture of a dragon with a spiked tail trying to chase down a broomstick-riding wizard.

When Luke finally got back home, it was time to pack things up and get ready to go, preferably while discussing magic with his mother.

“Do you remember when I was in the hospital?” he asked the night before it was time to leave.

His mother looked up from her plate of lasagna and nodded. “Of course I do, sweetie. Why?”

He poked at his plate. “Did they have trouble monitoring me? Like, the machines kept coming unplugged? I thought I might have been hallucinating because of the drugs, but now I'm not so sure.”

The look on his mother's face was almost worth the pain he'd gone through all those years ago. Almost. “You mean you were magicking the plugs out of the wall?” She said. “Those nurses were absolutely confounded by that! A little boy with two broken legs, and his machines are getting unplugged all the time! I suppose you were the one turning the lights on in the middle of the night, too?”

Luke grinned, perversely proud of his youthful talent for troublemaking. “I think so, yeah.”

“Well,” his mother said sternly, “I've half a mind to not give you any dessert for that. But only half a mind, after all, it's not every day we have ice cream, and I sincerely hope you'll never have the opportunity to do it again anyways.”

After dinner they worked on the jigsaw puzzle—today it was a young man in a hedge maze—and then Luke went to bed, ready for the next day's adventures. If Mister Westcott's description of how to get to the Hogwarts Express was any indication, adventure was going to be the order of the day.

\----------------

“Luke, wake up!”

His mother was pummeling him with a pillow, exactly the same wake-up call Luke had always gotten for school. Annalee Restimen was many things, but she was not the kind of mother who babied her child, and when she found something that worked, she stuck with it.

Luke rolled over and glared at her. “Stop it,” he said irritably as he rolled out of bed. It was unpleasantly early in the morning, so it was obvious that he was expected to shower and comb his hair and look nice for the train, which, if what he had already seen of the wizarding idea of modernity was any indication, might well be coal-powered and therefore put out enough soot to ruin a good shower with alarming speed.

He showered anyways.

When Luke was cleaned up and ready to go, he was actually a fairly decent specimen of humanity. The only thing that really bothered him about himself was the rather long, jagged scar across his forehead, artifact of the car crash that had killed his father and nearly killed him. He kept his hair long so that he didn't have to look at it. The ones on his legs, he couldn't avoid, so he wore long pants in the hottest of weather. It wasn't so much that he thought they were ugly as that the sight of them reminded him of his father's death, which he'd been forced by the collapsed body of the car to watch.

As he stepped out of the apartment, carrying a pair of small suitcases, he stared at his mother's car. It was dark blue. He'd insisted that she not get a red one when she'd bought one to replace the car ruined by the crash. Sometimes, he wished he hadn't. The fact that it was so conspicuously not red was just as clear a reminder of the old red sedan as a car the same color would have been. His mother stuffed the big trunk into the boot, and Luke tossed his suitcases in the backseat, then sat down in the front next to his mother. They pulled out of the parking lot onto the road, headed for King's Cross Station.

After a while, she said, “What are you thinking about?”

He sighed. “Dad.” It was more of a codeword than anything else. He rarely thought of his father, who he barely remembered. Instead, it was usually thoughts of the crash that provoked that reply. “I wonder,” he continued after a moment, “if maybe I could have saved him... I mean, if I'd known how to use magic. Or if he had been a wizard, if he could have stopped it from happening.”

There was only silence from the driver's side of the car for a long time. When Luke's mother finally did speak, it was to tell him they had arrived.

They piled out of the car, took the bags and such into the station, and set off for the junction of platforms nine and ten. When they arrived, Luke looked around in confusion. “You'd think there'd be more people here. But that must be the place. I mean, there's not exactly any other barriers between these two platforms.”

“Oi,” a voice snapped from behind him. “Step aside.”

“Theodore!” an old woman's voice shot back. “Be polite, or don't say anything!”

Luke turned to see the Theodore in question pushing a little cart piled high with luggage, and, as though a boy with shocking pink hair didn't stick out in public enough, a white owl in a cage.

He looked more than a bit cowed by the old woman behind him, but he put on a slightly lopsided smile and apologized to Luke.

Luke grinned. “Are you headed for the platform?” he asked.

Theodore seemed to be a bit put off by that question. “Er, do you mean... you know, the platform?”

Rather abruptly, it occurred to Luke that he had no idea how to tell this boy that he meant platform nine and three-quarters without letting him know that he was a wizard, which seemed to be illegal (or something), and as he didn't like the idea of a conversation consisting entirely of innuendo, he was stymied until his mother simply blurted out, “Platform nine and three-quarters, yes.”

Theodore grinned. “Cool. It's my first time, too. Grandma suggested I should try to be a bit less conspicuous today, but I'd like to get noticed on the platform.”

“Quit stalling, Teddy,” his grandmother called. She seemed to be sidling up to talk to Luke's mother, which could, in Luke's experience, only lead to the swapping of embarrassing stories if the subject of the stories was anywhere nearby.

“We'd better get going before they start talking about child-rearing,” Luke advised. Teddy nodded.

“Right then. Last one through's a rotten egg,” Teddy decreed, and with that, he was off for the barrier at a run. Luke nearly called out a warning to the boy to stop, but decided that, all things being equal, he'd rather not call attention to this bizarre scene. It turned out to be a good instinct, because Teddy ran straight trough the wall. Luke arched an eyebrow.

“Cool.”

He took off at a more leisurely pace, and made the rather significant mistake of going through with his eyes open.

The universe folded in half in front of him and then unfolded, and Luke stopped to decide if he was about to gag or not, at which point a cart piled with luggage smacked into his backside and knocked him over. He heard Teddy's voice chuckling at his misfortune as his nose met the pavement, and, from the feeling of it, broke. He rolled over and had just confirmed that there was, in fact, blood pouring down the front of his when a woman spoke.

“Oh dear, that's just no good at all.” A wand tapped his nose, though he couldn't see much past the tip of it through the tears already gathered in his eyes, and he felt his nose unbreak. It was a somewhat cold sensation, but at least the pain was gone.

A soft hand help him up and he wiped the tears from his eyes and got a good look at the person who had pulled him up. For a moment, he was very confused. It seemed as though the woman's voice he had heard had come from a girl about his age, or at least, that the girl had been the one to cast, silently, a spell that was able to fix a broken nose. He had to admit she was pretty—a stubborn little six-year-old's voice at the back of his head added somewhat nonsensically, “for a girl”—but pretty and good at magic were, in all likelihood, two entirely different things.

It wasn't until a moment later that Luke saw the woman behind the girl, probably her mother. She was tall and intimidating, with long black hair and a hooked nose. She was, as a matter of fact, the first witch Luke had seen who actually looked like the classical image of a witch, though the nose wart was missing.

“Thanks,” Luke said.

The witch smiled and stuck out a hand to him. It occurred to Luke that he was still grasping her daughter's hand. He hastily switched to the woman's hand and shook it. She smiled. “Name's Shelly,” she said. “Shelly Leiman. This is my daughter Violet. It's her first year here, which is something she and I have in common. I'll be teaching your Defense Against the Dark Arts class this year. About time that old fogey they had doing it quit.”

As they stepped away from the wall, Violet grinned and leaned over to Luke. “She's joking. The man teaching the class before was her father-in-law, and he didn't quit, he got switched to Potions.”

Luke watched as his mother and Teddy's grandmother came through the barrier. Annalee stopped, looking a titch put off by the experience—she had probably gone through with her eyes open. The moment she spotted Luke, however, all her concerns seemed to evaporate and she ran over to him.

“Oh, Luke, what happened?” she cried.

“It's okay, mum,” he said. “I fell over, but Mrs. Leiman here patched me up just fine. I barely felt a thing.” This wasn't strictly true, but he didn't particularly want to worry her. He might be feeling a mild urge to go and have a few stern words with Teddy, who had seemed a bit too amused about a broken nose, but that was something he didn't feel like sharing, especially in front of a teacher (since some of the sterner words were jinxes he'd found scrawled in the back of his used copy of the charms textbook).

After some fussing and talking about the injury he'd sustained, she let him get on the train, and he followed shyly after Violet, who seemed to know, if not exactly where she was going, at least why she was going there. They found a compartment—Luke insisted that they skip one where Teddy was sitting all alone, his hair now, somehow, blue—and slipped inside to sit down.

“Well,” Violet said after a minute or two of silence. “That was exciting. Here, let me help you with that.” She leaned forward, aiming her wand at Lukes face, and said, firmly, “Tergeo.” The blood on Luke's face, which had been beginning to dry, suddenly flew away, and Violet leaned back to survey her handiwork. “Much better. Now, where are you from?”

Luke smiled. “Stoughton, in Surrey. You?”

Violet smiled cheerily back at him and said, “London.”

Before their conversation could get any further, the door to the compartment slid open and a quizzical face peered in. “Is this room taken?” a smallish boy in spectacles asked. Luke shook his head and the boy came in, looking apprehensive.

“You know,” Luke said, “I'm not going to eat your face. Really, you can relax.”

The boy let out a nervous chuckle and took a seat next to Luke. “You never know, though, really. I mean, I might have chosen a compartment full of werewolves or something. There's been werewolves at Hogwarts before, even werewolves have to go to school.”

As the train lurched into motion, Luke stuck out a hand to the boy. “What's your name?”

“Mark Jonson,” the boy said. Either he wasn't the type to shake hands, or he completely missed the offer. Either way, he didn't say much, and the rest of the journey to Hogwarts was made somewhat awkward by his presence, since when he did speak it was, very nearly, not on the same subject as Luke and Violet were discussing.

Still, the journey wasn't all that bad. Between discussing the house system and speculating on what the headmaster might be like, it seemed to pass in no time at all.

They arrived at another station late in the evening and exited the train to find the platform full of students milling about. A rough, heavily accented voice was coming from the general direction of what appeared to be a very large pile of furs holding a lantern.

“Firs' years, over here!” the voice called, and the general flow of the shortest students led over in that direction.

The voice's owner turned out to be an improbably tall man named Hagrid, who Violet assured Luke was a half-giant. Luke was of the opinion that there was nothing half about him.

Hagrid led the first years to a small flotilla of boats floating on a lake, which Luke was rather unimpressed by. What was impressive was the castle. It sat on a cliff across the lake, made small by distance but still glimmering. Luke grinned. “We're going there?”

“Yep,” Violet said cheerily from the darkness next to him. “Hogwarts castle. Built more than a thousand years ago, you know.”

Luke shrugged. “Well, I wouldn't expect they'd have built a castle in nineteen-seventy-three. Still, I like it. It looks... homey.”

“Homey?” Violet parroted. “There are a lot of words I could use to describe Hogwarts, but homey is not one of them.”

They argued back and forth about whether or not a castle could be homey as they floated across to the castle in the boats. Luke's heart wasn't really in the debate after something bumped the bottom of their boat and Violet calmly stated that it must be the giant squid. Apart from the impossibility of a giant squid in a freshwater lake, there was the fact that it was entirely probable that that was exactly what had just bumped the boat. Needless to say, Luke found this a bit disturbing.

They bumped up to the dock at the other side of the lake after what, since the squid's revelation, seemed like an eternity. Luke stepped gratefully to the solid ground and shied away from the placid water until Hagrid led them all up the long stairway into the castle. Once they arrived, Hagrid turned and favored them all with a huge smile (as though he could give any other kind), then threw open the massive front doors and led them inside. The entrance hall was big, echoey, and dim, and the first years grew quiet as they were ushered into the castle. Hagrid brought them to a halt before a pair of big wooden doors and glanced around nervously until he was interrupted by the sound of footsteps, broken with the tap of a cane on the stone floors of the castle. He turned to look up at a distinguished looking older man heading down the hall towards him.

“Ah, Professor Leiman. Ready then?”

Professor Leiman nodded stiffly. He was wearing, in stark contrast to the robes that most of the magical community seemed to prefer, a pinstriped suit, predominantly black. He leaned on a cane with a polished but unadorned look to it, as though it was well cared for, but not particularly expensive. When he spoke, Luke was a bit surprised to hear that the man spoke with an American accent.

“Hello, students. My name is James Henry Leiman, and in addition to welcoming you to Hogwarts, I'll be teaching you Potions this year. As the second member of the staff you've met so far, and having asked Hagrid kindly not to usurp the privilege, allow me to be the first to welcome you, officially, to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Since you are first years, many of you will not know how the welcoming feast works. I will lead you into the Great Hall, and the Sorting Hat will sort you into your houses one by one, after performing a silly little song that will probably involve a lament regarding its current state of disrepair. When your name is called, you will approach the stool on which the hat is placed, and I will place the hat on your head. It will judge you and place you into the appropriate house. Once you have been sorted, you will proceed directly to your house table, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred galleons, etcetera, etcetera. Now, I am told by a very reliable source that, if there is, in fact, a house that you would prefer to be in, the hat will generally try to reason its way into putting you into it. I would also advise you not to try to choose your house, as the hat tends to know what it is doing. And besides that, ever since that whole Voldemort business, the poor Slytherins have been getting very lonely.”

He tapped on the door to the Great Hall with his cane, and it opened slowly, making a very stately sort of a creaking noise. A preposterously tiny man sat at the center of a long table at one end of the room, but stood up on his chairwhen the doors came open and called for silence. He got it almost instantly. Professor Leiman led the first years into the Great Hall and stopped short just in front of the table. He tapped the floor with his cane and a stool appeared, just as Hagrid came in and placed a tall, somewhat charred hat that had once been pointed on the stool. It had clearly been set on fire some time in the past, and looked to be a bit the worse for wear, as though it had seen a lot of heads. Considering what Professor Leiman had told them, Luke mused, it might have seen thousands. A wide tear just above the brim of the hat opened up and a rough, very dry-sounding voice boomed forth.

“Centuries have come and gone  
beneath my watchful eye  
and I have seen ten thousand heads  
with twenty thousand eyes.

“But all of those who put me on  
can tell each other true  
there's no mistake about just where  
the Sorting Hat put you!

“Whether Slytherin (where slyness rules)  
is the place in which you dwell,  
or Gryffindor, and bravery,  
is where your allegiance fell,

“no matter where I put you,  
you're bound to make new friends.  
Even if your buddies  
have some strange and om'nous ends.

“See, Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw  
are not at all alike  
except in that I have the word  
in where your heels should strike.

“So if in loyal Hufflepuff,  
where hard work is an art,  
or if in clever Ravenclaw  
(they're all so very smart),

“you know you have one common trait  
of which you should be proud:  
you all put me upon your head  
and your house was named aloud!”

Once it became clear that the hat was done singing, Professor Leiman began reading off names. Luke watched as the various students stepped forward to be judged. At some students, the hat would barely be on their heads before it had shouted their house into the hall, but a few sat on the stool for a couple of minutes. Violet was sorted into Griffindor, Mark Jonson into Hufflepuff. When “Lupin, Theodore” was called, Luke was a bit irritated to see that Teddy's hair had undergone yet another color change and was now violently green. He was sorted into Ravenclaw. When Luke's turn came, near the end of the sorting (there were only four students after him), he sat down and the hat was placed on his head and immediately started laughing.

“Oh, this is a clever joke! I sorted this one seventy-one years ago! Nice try, though.”

The Great Hall went completely silent. Luke felt his face turning bright red. The hat hadn't done anything like this for any of the others. Of course, given the fact that, several seconds after the hat's declaration, you could still have heard a pin drop, it was entirely possible that it had never done this before, in which case Luke felt obliged to be even more embarrassed.

“I beg your pardon,” Professor Leiman said after a moment.

“You heard me. I've sorted this one already. He was in Slytherin.”

Luke felt compelled to pull the hat down over his eyes, but of course that might have been extremely rude. What, after all, does one do about a sentient hat?

“Well,” Professor Leiman said after another long pause, “Humor us. Sort him again.”

The hat gave a long-suffering sigh and thought. Luke heard its voice, much softer, in his ear. “Well, there is something remarkably different about you now. You're softer this time around, like you've learned a lot, and you haven't got the same arrogance. You'd do well in Slytherin. Very, very well. But then, knowing what you've done... I might hesitate a bit. Still, you're not quite right for Ravenclaw, and Hufflepuffs would bore you to death... most of them anyway. Gryffindor is right out. No, it still had better be...” and then it shouted, “Slytherin!”

Professor Leiman took the hat off his head and Luke walked over to the Slytherin table, but they weren't applauding as hard as they had for the other students. Luke had read his copy of the history textbook, and he had a couple of theories on why. He didn't like them very much.

After the sorting was through, the extremely short man who had called for silence when the first years entered stood up again and cleared his throat.

“Well then, students! Welcome back to Hogwarts, and to the first years, welcome! I am Professor Flitwick, and I am the headmaster of this school! Now, there are a few rules of which you should all be made aware! First! The forest at the edge of the grounds is called the Forbidden Forest for a reason, that reason being that our groundskeeper is far too old, and his apprentice far too young, to be tromping off into it to rescue foolish students who have decided to go exploring! Second! The small patch of swamp on the fourth floor is not a toy, do not use it as such! Third! Mister Filch has asked me to remind you all that there is a list of items banned from Hogwarts halls posted clearly on the notice boards in your common rooms! Finally, I would like to point out a few changes in our staff! Professor James Leiman, who taught Defense Against the Dark Arts, has been moved to a position as Potions Teacher! His daughter-in-law, Professor Shelly Leiman, will be taking over his position! Professor Sprout, who served as our Herbology teacher for quite some time, has this year been replaced by a new staff member, but Professor Shelly Leiman will be taking over as the new head of Hufflepuff! Meanwhile, I would also like to welcome Professor Neville Longbottom to the staff as the new Herbology teacher, thereby proving that it is, in fact, possible to rearrange the teaching assignments quite as much as anything else in one year provided that you are creative enough! Now, with nothing further to say, let's eat!”

And with that, food appeared out of nowhere on the tables. Luke dug in, and tried to forget about the hat. He could really only hope that nobody else had come up with the same theories that he had.

\---------------

“Luke Restimen?” Luke turned and looked up at the person who had called his name. He looked too high. Professor Flitwick stood behind him, smiling. It was a dangerous sort of a smile. Like he expected something to happen. “Could you come with me?”

Luke followed the Headmaster out of the line of Slytherins and back into the Great Hall. The Heads of Houses were arrayed around the tables, as well as an old woman Luke didn't recognize and Professor James Leiman. The old woman stepped forward and stuck out her hand. “Hello, Luke,” she said. “My name is Minerva McGonagall. I'm afraid this is probably going to be the only time we meet, which is a shame, because you are an interesting person, if what the hat said about you this evening is true. We have one more person on the way, I believe. He insisted that we have this meeting with you present, which is just as well, because if he hadn't you'd be entirely left out. I'm afraid it's a habit of the Wizarding community to exclude the young in order to protect them.”

Even as she spoke, the door to the Great Hall opened again and a lanky figure walked in. He was wearing a long, dark robe and, incongruously, a fairly nice pair of sneakers. As he came closer, Luke could make out a messy head of hair, a pair of thick-rimmed glasses over sharp, critical eyes, and what might have been a faint scar on his forehead.  
He stopped in front of Luke and said, “Hello, Luke.”

Luke swallowed. Hard. This man was intimidating, and hell if he knew why. “Hi,” he squeaked.

The man smiled. “I'm Harry Potter. Does that name ring a bell at all?”

Luke shrugged. “Well, you were mentioned in my history book. You killed some guy named Voldemort.”

Potter shrugged. “As far as I can tell, he's being completely honest, but I was never much good at that sort of thing. James?”

The professor stepped forward and knelt down. He favored his left leg just slightly. “Luke,” he said, “I'm going to cast a spell, to try and figure out how much you know about what happened with the hat earlier tonight. Afterwards, we'll tell you what we think, but right now, you'll have to trust me, all right?”

Luke nodded, and James Leiman closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again and snapped, “Legilimens.”

Luke was tossed down a path of memory, to the Sorting. The hat whispered in his ear again, and then, he was thrown backwards, to the earliest memory... his father, giving him an apple. He'd been taught to clean it off before he ate it, because it might have pesticides on it...

And then, the room swam back into view before his eyes.

“He's doesn't remember,” Professor Leiman stood up, looked at Potter for a moment. “He has fragments. There's the really important stuff, floating around, the stuff you'd expect him to remember. The incantation for the killing curse might be on the tip of his tongue for the rest of his life. He's got a vague impression of your parents' deaths. Not much else. It's... very fragmented.

Potter nodded. “Right. Well, I suppose I'll just sit here and wait to see what happens. Professor McGonagall?”

She shook her head. “I'm not a professor anymore, Mister Potter. Just Minerva will do.”

“Oh,” Professor Leiman said, “just Minerva? There's no such thing as just Minerva.”

She flashed him a smile, but her voice was edged with frost as she said, “you behave, James.” She conjured a chair with a wave of her hand and sat down in front of Luke. “What we suspect, and what James... pardon me, what Professor Leiman has just confirmed, is that you harbor a fragment of the soul of Lord Voldemort in you. How it happened, we don't know, especially given Harry's accounts of what happened the night Voldemort died. There was a theory, one of Albus Dumbledore's pet theories, that Harry had a piece of Voldemort's soul... stuck to him, for lack of a better word, the night that his parents were killed. It's possible that... well...”

“It's possible,” Harry said, “That when Voldemort tried to kill me the second time, he ripped away that part of his soul, and that it found you that night. You were born May second, Nineteen-ninety-eight, right?”

Luke nodded. “And you think that Voldemort's soul just kinda... stuck to me?”

Harry nodded. “Lord knows the man was persistent enough, he'd have found a way. I was afraid, when I heard what the hat had said about you, that you might be possessed by him, or maybe a very dangerous person because of his influence. But if the teachers here are willing to trust that you're okay, then I suppose I'll have to be, too.”

Luke nodded. He still couldn't shake the feeling that this man was about to pull out a wand and curse him, but at least now he knew why.

“I'm afraid of you,” Luke said.

Potter nodded. “I don't doubt it. Something inside you died at my hands. If it makes you feel any better, I'm terrified of you. Do you want my advice?”

Luke nodded slowly. “If you think it's good advice, sir.”

Potter smiled. It looked forced. “When the other students ask you what happened, tell them that the hat's old and damaged and made a mistake.” He turned to the professors. “I've got to go. My youngest was mid-tantrum when your letter arrived, and I'm sure Ginny's going to be irritated with me for taking off like that, Voldemort or not.”

They all said goodbye to him and watched him go. Only when the doors had swung shut behind him did anyone speak.

“Well,” Professor Flitwick said, “If that's all, then we can get on with the evening, right? Thanks for stopping by, Minerva. So good to see you again, really.”

The old woman nodded. “Likewise, Filius. Now, who will be escorting this young man to his common room?”

“That would be me,” the Charms instructor, Professor Gills said. “I am, after all, his head of house.” He nodded at Luke. “Come along then.”

Luke followed him to the dungeons, and Professor Gills led him to what seemed an ordinary enough dead end in the corridor. He stopped, and for a moment Luke thought he was going mumble a rude word and turn around, having gotten lost. Instead, Gills announced, to thin air, “Purity.” The wall in front of him opened up to reveal a well appointed room full of squashy armchairs and a few sofas. A fireplace was sitting in the corner, with a blaze going cheerfully in it, although Luke couldn't help but think of just how tall that chimney must be.

“That's your password to get into this room,” Professor Gills said. “Remember it. Sorry again, by the way, about pulling you away, but we've got to be sure about these things.” He peered around the common room, apparently not approving of the three or four students sitting up in their armchairs around the common room. Once his inspection was complete, he turned and left, letting the door slide closed behind him.

Luke looked around at the various faces in the room. One boy, about his age, maybe a little older, jumped up and said, enthusiastically, “Is it true?”

Luke nodded glumly. “Yes,” he said. “It's true. Micheal Jackson is dead.”

The boy stopped in the middle of an excited shout and stared at him. “Who?”

Luke, feeling satisfied with this response, walked over to an armchair, sat down, and refused to say another word until someone came right out and asked him, “Are you really Voldemort?”

At the question, he looked up and rolled his eyes. “Oh, yeah, absolutely. You can tell by the way I'm eleven years old, that's a dead giveaway! No, you twit, I'm not the reincarnation of some dead goth, I'm Luke Restimen. The hat got confused, who knows why. If I had to guess, I'd say it has something to do with the fact that it's missing a chunk off the top.”

“Well why did they stop you from coming to the common room with us, then?” the first boy asked.

Luke sighed. “Look, if I have to explain this all to every single one of you weirdos, I might just see if I can get switched to Ravenclaw, because obviously I'm too smart for you. Professor Gills just said, they were checking, because it sounded an awful lot like the hat thought I was Voldemort.” Luke sighed, shook his head. “I'm tired, and nobody's showed me where I can go to get some sleep yet. Does anyone have any—“

“What are you all doing up?” The question came from somewhere behind Luke. He turned around and found himself face to face with a seventh year who looked more than a bit irritated about the fact that he had just asked a very valid question. When he saw Luke, he nodded. “Right, Little Voldy, I expect the hat's blunder's got you a fan club then? All of you, off to bed. You, Restimen, follow me, I'll show you where the first years sleep. None of these... children... is a first year.”

Luke followed after the young man, who led him through the same door he'd emerged from. “I hope they're not causing you any problems,” he said. “I could tell them off proper if you like.”

Luke shook his head. “No, I just need a good night's rest. I'm getting kinda snappish. Today's been... weird. And I just found out I'm a wizard a couple of months ago, so it's really saying something that I think it's been a weird day.”

“You're not a pure-blood?”

Luke shook his head. “No. I don't think so. I mean, I think I've got a little French in me, and maybe a little German.”

“You're definitely not a pure-blood if you can't answer that question.” The older boy shrugged. “Well, this just gets weirder and weirder. I'm starting to think the hat was really damaged when it got set on fire. A mudblood in Slytherin?”

Luke stared at him for a second. “You do realize that you've just said you're beginning to think something that was set on fire was really damaged, don't you?”

\----------------

“And you actually spoke to Harry Potter?”

Violet's amazement over the encounter with Potter seemed a bit disproportionate. “What was he like?” She asked, a bit breathlessly.

Luke thought about that for a moment. He looked down at his glass of milk. At least milk was still milk at Hogwarts. “He was terrifying,” Luke said, honestly. “But then, he spent the whole time looking like he was about ready to erase me from existence if I so much as used a turn of phrase that Voldemort was fond of.”

“Well,” Violet said, “He is an auror.”

Luke raised an eyebrow. “I'm sorry, he's a what, now?”

“An auror,” Violet said. “He's like... like a detective, but with... with a wand. A dark wizard catcher.”

“Oh, so that must be how he got that scar,” Luke said.

Violet looked at him like perhaps he'd just professed an urge to slap small children. “You mean the scar on his forehead?” Luke nodded, slowly, trying to think if there might be a way to avoid looking like an idiot. “He got that from Voldemort,” Violet said. “When Voldemort tried to kill him. When he was a baby.”

Luke sighed. “I'm never going to understand all of this Voldemort stuff, am I? It's all blood purity this, and immortality that...”

“Don't forget the cruelty and murder,” Violet said darkly. “It was a really bad time, you know, when he was running around. It used to be people refused to even say Voldemort's name.”

“But that couldn't have been his real name, could it?” Luke said. “I mean, Voldemort? Come on, that sounds like a cartoon supervillain. Voldemort should be off terrorizing little blue people that live in mushrooms, not all of England.”

Violet chuckled. “Well, yeah, I think his real name was Tom Ripple or something, but that's hardly as memorable as Voldemort.”

“It sounds a little less crazy,” Luke said.

Violet sighed. “I just can't win this argument, can I?”

Luke shook his head. “No, you really can't. So, what's up first on the schedule?”

“Potions, with Professor Leiman, for both of us. Then we split up, but you'll have the Ravenclaws to keep you company in Charms.”

“Oh joy,” Luke said grimly. “An hour of Teddy, changing his hair. How does he do that, anyways?”

Violet grinned. “Magic.”

When they walked into the Potions classroom in the dungeon, Professor Leiman had three cauldrons set up on a table in front of the class. He waited until everyone was seated and then he stepped out in front of the table and gestured at the cauldrons. They turned transparent.

“Welcome, class. I see they've chosen to give me Slytherins and Gryffindors together, that's always a treat. We all know you get along so nicely.” He sighed, shrugged. “Anyways, just to see where we all are, I'll start by asking you all a simple question: what is in the middle cauldron?”

Luke peered at the cauldrons. They were all filled with liquids. One was filled with orange liquid, one with clear, and one with what looked like liquid gold. The clear liquid was in the middle.

A hand went up towards the front of the room and Professor Leiman pointed and said, “Go.”

The confused student hazarded, “Is it veritaserum?”

Leiman shook his head. He dipped his hand in the cauldron, cupping out a bit of its contents, which he then drank. “No. This is water. The orangey stuff on the left is napalm, a muggle weapon of the nastiest possible nature, and the stuff on the right is potencia poten, the oldest magical potion known to man. For the purpose of our studies today, there is no difference between these three substances, although I would strongly discourage bringing the napalm anywhere near an open flame. If I were to ask you to define a potion, most of you would likely give the standard, somewhat arrogant definition of a liquid mixture with magical properties. This is wrong. A potion can be magical. A potion can be nonmagical. It simply has to have an effect on its environment, especially, but not only, if consumed. Pure water, therefore, is a thirst-curing potion. It's also the only potion you can get by casting a spell.”

He sat down on the edge of his desk and pointed to the napalm. “This stuff right here is a potion that is produced almost exclusively by muggles to harm one another. Most of the world's most powerful harmful potions are muggle-made. Believe me, I know, I've been on the wrong end of more than a few of them. Of course, some of the most complicated helpful potions are muggle-made, too. Muggles have a different word for the process of potionmaking. They call it chemistry. Which brings us to our text for today. Open your copies of the Potionmaker's Pal to page twelve, the Periodic Table of the Elements...”

\----------------

“Well, it was an interesting lesson, but what on earth is that man's obsession with muggles?”

Luke sighed. Walking to Charms with the rest of the Slytherins was proving to be an exercise in not yelling at them about his muggle-born status. And then Professor Gills had to be running late for the lesson. He was starting to consider looking for Teddy just to be away from the many variations on the theme of how wizards were better than muggles.

“What do you mean,” one of the Ravenclaws asked.

“He spent the whole time talking about how muggles are so great at making potions. They don't make potions, they mix up different little... fiddly ingredients, or whatever it is they do, and then they use them like potions. They probably don't even do anything that great.”

“All right,” Luke said. “That's it, Runel. Go ahead and say stuff you don't know anything about. Amuse me. You don't know what napalm is, do you?”

Runel stared at him for a moment. “What, and you do?”

“It's sticky, for one thing. And they light it on fire, and it burns really slowly and very hot. They drop it out of airplanes onto battlefields, and it gets on the enemy soldiers and sticks to them, and it won't come off, so they're covered in hot, burning, smoking goo. It's chemistry, mate. It'll mess you up.”

“I see we've all been duly impressed by Professor Leiman's first potions lesson,” Professor Gills said from behind them. He was headed down the hall towards them, looking a bit harried. “Terribly sorry I'm late, class, but when Harry Potter comes calling, you don't make him wait. Head of the Auror Office and all that.”

Gills looked mournfully at the still-locked door to his classroom. “You get a period free to get organized, and look where it gets you.” He waved at the door and it swung open. “All right. In you go.”

Once the class was all settled in, Luke was disappointed to find himself at the edge of the group of Slytherins—apparently, showing up Runel had been a bad social move—and stuck at a table with Teddy Lupin.

“So, hey, Luke, right?”

Luke nodded. “Yeah. I'm tr—“

“Okay, cool, look, do you think my hair is better green or blue?” Luke looked up. Teddy was shifting his hair between the two colors. Neither looked very good.

“Brown,” Luke said. “Or black. Or whatever it's supposed to be. Can we please listen to the teacher now?”

Teddy nodded, and for a moment, Luke made the mistake of believing that this signaled acquiescence, and then, Teddy said, “So, did we get off on the wrong foot or something? I mean, I didn't think I'd done anything to upset you—“

“Well, keep talking, you'll get there,” Luke snapped. Professor Gills stopped in the middle of a talk about wand motions to glare reproachfully in the Luke's general direction. That, at least, seemed to shut Teddy up. For about five minutes.

“All I want to do is have a conversation. Is that so much to ask?”

Luke raised his hand. Professor Gills stumbled over his own speech as his mouth caught up with the fact that a student apparently had a question, an unusual development during the explanation of the fact that it's advisable to point your wand away from yourself when performing magic.

“Yes, Mister Restimen?” Gills managed after a moment.

Luke put on his sweetest smile and said, very politely, “Is there a charm to make my talkative classmates shut up and let me take notes?”

Unexpectedly, Teddy let out a guffaw. “Good one, Luke!”

“I was talking,” Luke said, “About you.”

Teddy grinned. “I know. It was still pretty good.”

Gills made a disapproving little noise and said, “Boys, if you can't behave, I'll have to start deducting house points.”

Luke knew enough to shut up, though he silently added Professor Gills to his list of people without a clue. He absorbed about two thirds of the lesson and was intensely glad that Gills thought that having the first years start waving wands around on their first day was a bad idea. He didn't want to be anywhere near Teddy Lupin when that boy started trying to cast a spell. In fact, he'd rather be in a different room.

When Charms class let out, Professor Gills pulled Luke aside, apparently just to ask him how he was doing.

“I'm fine, sir,” Luke said. “I was a bit irritated when Lupin wouldn't shut up during class, but I've had worse problems. Are you sure you can't teach me a silencing charm?”

Gills smiled tolerantly. “I'm afraid not, Luke, although we'll be working on hover charms tomorrow, so you have that to look forward to. Maybe you can figure out some kind of mischief to get up to with a hover charm.”

“I don't want mischief,” Luke replied. “I want to learn magic.”

Gills' smile turned into a grin. “Sometimes they're one and the same. You'd better get off to your next class. Herbology, isn't it? You do know where the greenhouses are, right?”

Luke nodded. “In the dungeons, right?”

Gills stared at him for a moment. “Tell me you're joking.”

“Of course I am, sir. They're out on the grounds. We could see them on the way up to the castle last night.”

Still, Luke thought, he might want a guide. And, as it turned out, he got one. When he stepped out of the classroom, he was greeted by a very short, very blonde girl in Slytherin robes. “Hi,” she said.

He waved. “Hi.”

She grinned at him. “I'm Marissa. I thought you might want someone to go down to Herbology with you.”

He shrugged. “I guess. Thanks.”

They started walking, headed for the Great Hall and the greenhouses. “That was really funny, that joke about Lupin.” Marissa seemed to have been genuinely amused by Luke's joke, and he wasn't about to look a gift horse in the mouth. “And it was pretty cool that you knew what Nathan is.” The second half of the compliment, on the other hand, threw him for a loop.

“I knew what?”

“Nathan. That's what Professor Leiman called it, right?”

Luke laughed. “Oh! Napalm, okay. It's because there's this old movie that everybody... well, all the muggles, anyways, knows this one quote from, where this guy says that he loves the smell of napalm in the morning. So everybody knows what napalm is, because if you don't, you'd think that guy was talking about some kind of German sausages or something.”

“So are you really muggle-born?” Marissa asked.

Luke rolled his eyes. “You're going to start, too, aren't you? Look, if I get asked about this one more time—“

“I'm not trying to be mean!” She objected. “I'm just curious. After all, why would you get sorted into Slytherin if you're not a pure-blooded wizard?”

“Why would you get sorted into Slytherin if you're not even willing to call me a mudblood like the rest of them?” Luke retorted. “I mean, not that it's a particularly great insult. I figured it was just kinda rude until someone told me that it's supposed to be the worst thing you could call someone. Isn't calling someone who doesn't know what it means kind of like insulting a blind man in sign language?”

Marissa giggled at that. “Well, it's just kind of an old quirk. Me, I'm just from a really old wizarding family. We've got roots all over, but I guess a lot of my family from a bunch of generations back were Slytherins before we left the country, and now we're back, and I'm the first in my family to go to Hogwarts in eighty years, and bam, I get shuffled right back into Slytherin. It's not just personality. It's history.”

Luke fell silent as he thought about that little nugget of wisdom while they crossed the entrance hall and stepped out onto the grounds.

When Luke and Marissa arrived at the greenhouses, the other students were already starting to sort themselves into groups, entirely separated by house. The Hufflepuffs were there, and most of the Slytherins were gathered into little knots just at the edge of sneering distance, all the better, Luke mused, to look down on the Hufflepuffs. Just one of the Hufflepuffs was alone. Mark Jonson's spectacled face and cinnamon-colored hair stood out well against the green of the grounds around him, and nobody else seemed to want to talk to him. Luke wasn't surprised, but he had his doubts about whether avoiding a little awkwardness was really worth the price of hanging out with people like Runel.

“Hey Mark!”

Mark looked up, as though startled, and Luke waved. Mark waved back awkwardly, and Luke started over towards him. Marrissa followed him. Luke was about to introduce them when the greenhouse door popped open and the rounded, cheery face of Professor Longbottom appeared in its place.

“Aha! Slytherins and Hufflepuffs, follow me. We'll be in greenhouse one today. It's the shrivelfig, you know, got to harvest the fruits before the plant sucks them back up. Very tricky business, because it knows you're coming and tries to hide them from you.”

The shrivelfig, it turned out, was also one of the most invasively fragrant plants Luke had ever encountered. The entire greenhouse smelled so sweet that Luke wanted to just lie down and take a nap. It was a really great defense mechanism for the fig, which operated like a game of backwards whack-a-mole. Even with Luke, Marrisa, and Mark all working together on one tree—Professor Longbottom not only didn't mind mixed-house work groups, he actively broke up the single-house ones—it was difficult to grab the fruits, and the hypnotic, sleepy scent of the tree slowed them all down. Except for Mark, who by the end of the class had twice as many of the fruits as Luke and Marissa put together. The professor gave him a chocolate frog for getting the most in the class, and they all headed back to the castle together, Mark tossing his still-boxed treat in the air and catching it again and again.

Eventually, it didn't come back down.

“Hey!” Mark exclaimed in a puzzled voice. “What the?”

A peal of harsh laughter from behind signaled the arrival of Hieronymus Runel. Luke turned and saw him holding his wand out, pointed at Mark's chocolate frog box, which was hovering about ten feet in the air.

He twitched his wand and the candy flew to his outstretched hand.

Luke sighed. “Give it back, Runel,” he called to his fellow Slytherin.

“Make me,” Runel said. Luke had to admit it was a pretty convincing argument. He thought about his wand, but whatever anyone else wanted to say about his being fifty percent post-consumer dark wizard, whatever Voldemort might have known about kicking asses with magic, the sum total of what Luke Restimen knew about magic was that there was a right way and a wrong way to hold a wand.

So, he reasoned, if magic wouldn't work, he'd just have to get a little closer and do things the old-fashioned way. He sauntered over to Runel, doing his best not to look like he was completely without a plan.


	2. I've Got This Friend...

“So, you see, ma'am, I was really just trying to help out my fellow student.”

Professor Shelly—she refused to use the last name in order to avoid confusion—pinched the bridge of her nose. “I fail to see where helping your fellow students equates to punching other students in the nose.”

Luke nodded. “To be fair, he had drawn his wand on me by then.”

“It's true,” Mark said from behind Luke. “It was lucky Runel didn't hex him or something.”

The professor shook her head, like she was trying to dislodge a particularly bad headache. “I should have stuck with teaching muggles,” she mumbled. “All right, here's the deal. I won't punish you too hard. You were trying to do the right thing, and Runel already lost points for Slytherin by being a collosal... uh... jerk. So just ten points from Slytherin, and a warning that if it happens again, you'llget detention and lose a lot more points, no matter how many points the one you punched out just lost for your house. Now get to lunch, before my head hurts any worse.”

Luke nodded and scurried out of her office, Mark hot on his heels.

“Thanks, by the way,” Mark said.

“You already said that,” Luke pointed out.

Mark shrugged. “It needs saying. You didn't have to help me out, and you were going up against your own house.”

Luke chuckled. “Mark, no matter what rumors you might have heard, there is no sign in the Slytherin common room that encourages us to steal things from other students, whether it's a demonstration of magical ability or not. For one thing, that wouldn't be nearly sly or stuck-up enough.”

They stepped into the Great Hall together, ready to split up and head for their separate tables, but they hadn't gotten more than a few steps in when about a quarter of the Hufflepuffs stood up and started applauding. One of the first years who had watched the fight ran over and shook Luke's hand. Luke felt his cheeks heating up. A prefect stood up from the table and shooed away the first year, then turned around and, with some cajoling and a little more threatening, managed to get the Huffflepuffs to stop their impromptu standing ovation, but the damage was done. Luke really wanted to go and hide.

“Hey,” the prefect said. “I can't say I approve of your methods, but you certainly did get the job done.”

“Well, what was I supposed to do, let somebody steal his chocolate frog?”

“Are you sure,” the prefect asked, “that you aren't an undercover Gryffindor?” He grinned and pressed something into Luke's hand. “Go on, get to your table.”

Luke looked down and found a little wrapped candy in his hand.

He looked around the Great Hall. A few students were sitting with members of other houses, but most of the tables were populated exclusively by one house. He shrugged and looked around for Marissa. He found her sitting alone at a table. Well, almost alone. There was another student across from her, but Luke didn't recognize him. He was wearing Ravenclaw robes. As Luke rushed over to sit down, a tap on his shoulder made him turn around.

“Hey, beat-down-boy,” Violet said. “Heard you had a run-in with Darth Mum. Where's Mark?”

Luke pointed, and Violet rushed off to grab the confused Hufflepuff and drag him over to the table that Luke had just sat down at. Luke looked up at the Ravenclaw that he hadn't recognized and shook his head in disbelief. “Teddy?”

“Yeah,” Teddy said. “It's me. I tried brown. You like?”

“It's nice,” Luke said. “You don't even look like you're trying to stand out at a punk rock concert.” The look Teddy gave him was enough to tell Luke that he hadn't gotten the joke. “So, are we all being ostracized from our house tables, or just us Slytherins?”

“You never even tried to sit with the others,” Marissa said, “and you didn't get to see the rest of us sit down.”

“Yeah, but there's tons of room over at Slytherin central,” Violet said, “And Luke did just try to bash in Pureblood McJerkalot's face, so he's almost certainly not going to be welcome there. As for me and the Gryffindors, they'll just have to get over my habit of hanging out with Slytherins. I like the bad boys. It's a quirk.”

“If you're flirting with me, you might want to try being less subtle,” Luke said. “I don't think a French-speaker would have caught that.”

Violet stuck her tongue out at him. “Just because I'm making a joke about how all Slytherins are bad doesn't mean I'm flirting.”

“No,” Marissa said. “But the flirting sure does.”

“Girls, please,” Teddy said. “Don't fight over him. I'm here for a reason.”

Violet, Marissa, and Luke all turned as one to him and let loose with different versions of “shut up, Teddy.”

Lunch was over before too long and the two Slytherins were off to History of Magic with Teddy. For a scant few moments when the ghost popped through the chalkboard at the front of the classroom, Luke thought that this might be an interesting class. And then Professor Binns started talking, and Luke gradually came to the realization that Professor Binns was a ghost mostly because something as exciting as respiration was basically incompatible with the man. He was not the kind of history teacher who made a point of explaining why something happened. For Professor Binns, it seemed, it was enough that it happened, and that it happened at a specific date, and that his students know that date. Luke and Teddy talked for most of the class.

“So how do you do that thing with your hair?” Luke finally asked.

Teddy grinned. “It's been bothering you, hasn't it?”

Luke nodded. “On a very deep and aggravating level, yes.”

“I'm a metamorphmagus,” Teddy said. “It means I can change my appearance at will. Pretty handy sometimes.”

“Oh.” Luke shrugged. “So is this not what you really look like?”

Teddy grinned and screwed his eyes tight shut. His face changed shape a bit, his nose got a little longer, and his mouth grew narrower.

“Cool,” Luke said after a few moments. “I bet you can do really good impressions.”

Teddy shook his head. His features slowly returned to normal. “Nah. My control isn't quite that good yet.”

By the time class was over, the only one who had gotten any notes taken down was Marissa, and hers trailed off into comments on how dull the class was by about halfway through.

“You know, Marissa,” Luke said as they were on their way to Defense Against the Dark Arts, their last class of the day, “I was counting on your notes to get me through this class.”

“Well,” she replied, “Maybe you shouldn't have been.”

“Maybe we can combine notes,” Luke suggested. “You take the first half of class, and I'll do the second.”

“Yeah,” Marissa said. “Because that's absolutely going to work.”

“It might happen,” Luke said. “You never know.”

“Lukey!”

Given the enthusiasm of the greeting, Luke half expected to turn around and find a puppy barreling down the hall after him. Instead, he saw Violet running down the hall with her books. “I'm so excited for class,” she said as she got close enough to speak without shouting.

“Did you just call me Lukey?”

She had the decency to turn a fun shade of red and look kinda sheepish. “Sorry. I won't do it again. It's just that I've been watching my mum do the lesson plans all summer, and it's her first year, and it's my first year, and I'm really excited to see how she does.”

Luke gave a theatrical little shudder. “If it's anything like the chewing out she gave me after that fight with Runel, it'll be quite something.”

Violet rolled her eyes. “You shut up. She probably let you off light. I mean, you hit another student and you only lost your house ten points, no detention or anything. She probably approved.”

They arrived at the classroom and stepped inside. A pair of enormous black cats sat at either side of the simple desk at the front of the room, and Professor Shelly was leaning against the chalkboard, equally distant from both of the cats. Once everyone was in the room, she waved her wand at the door and it swung shut.

“Hello, class,” she said. “Wands away, quills out. We'll be starting with a little quiz, don't worry you won't be graded, I just want to see where you all are.”

Another wave of her wand and papers appeared on all the desks. Ten minutes later, she collected the papers and, apparently satisfied merely that they were done, said nothing more about them. Instead, she pointed to the two cats that had kept a watchful eye on the whole process.

“Can anyone, besides, of course, Violet, tell me what manner of creature these cats are?”

When nobody was able to provide an answer, the professor grinned. “I didn't expect you to be able to. They're actually rather obscure, and they don't exist in the wild.” With a wave of her wand, the cats evaporated into smoke and dissipated. “Those were what the Native Americans call pono. It translates roughly to spirit-cats. They're one of the few spells that can do anything whatsoever to deter a dementor. They also have uses in duelling, especially against dark wizards, since they can absorb almost any curse, and even a killing curse can't go through them. Unfortunately, a lot of the wizarding community in the Western world thinks that pono are dark magic because they can be destroyed by a patronus charm. A pair of pono could easily be the best defense a person has in the fight against the dark arts, but they're often despised because of a simple misconception. One of the most important things that you must learn when fighting the dark arts is how to recognize them. That, class, is what I'm here to teach you.”

Professor Shelly ran through the broader points of spotting the dark arts for about fifteen minutes, then let the class ask questions. Apparently, her lesson plan had been centered around the idea that the first day of lessons was not liable to be filled with attentive students in the habit of diligently taking notes. Eventually, the class devolved into a discussion of who was the worst dark wizard of all time. The students were split about evenly between Voldemort, Gellert Grindlewald, and Morgan le Fay. Luke opted not to participate in the conversation.

Once class let out, they all headed out as fast as possible. It was time for packing in as much fun before supper as possible.

Luke, Marissa, and Violet met up with Teddy and Mark in the entrance hall and together the five of them wandered off to find something to do.

A number of students were playing Gobstones in the Great Hall, which held some amusement value because a particularly loudmouthed second-year Hufflepuff was clearly out of his league and kept getting sprayed. Naturally, all the boys found this perfectly hilarious, although Mark was the only one to laugh loudly enough that others heard him. After the other students had stopped staring, he sat down and pulled out his chocolate frog.

“My cousin taught me a trick,” he said, opening the box just slightly and reaching in. “You can turn off the charm.”

Luke was the only one really paying attention, but he watched in fascination as Mark drew out a squirming, struggling... well, the name of the candy was pretty well on the ball.  
“That's a bit disturbing.” Luke said.

Mark shrugged. “You get used to it. For a while, they put out special ones for Halloween that screamed when you bit into 'em, but too many kids were getting nightmares.” He held the wiggly little thing down and pulled out his wand with his free hand. He pointed it at the frog and snapped, “Finite!”

The frog curled up into a tight ball and immediately lost a lot of its detail, becoming more of an impressionistic and delicious sculpture of a frog than a quasi-living thing. Luke was quite happy with this change.

“My cousin says you get more chocolate out of it this way,” Mark said. With a considerable effort, he broke the thick piece of chocolate roughly in half. “You should get a piece. If it wasn't for you, I wouldn't have this thing.”

Luke shook his head. “I really couldn't. I'd just wind up picturing it squirming.”

“Then at least take the card,” Mark said, pulling a little card out of the box and handing it to Luke. It had a picture of an old man with quite a lot of beard on it. He was smiling and, occasionally, waving. “That one's Dumbledore,” Mark explained. “Part of their classics line. They discontinued those cards for three years after he died, but then they brought them back with a new picture and they started selling really well. It was probably a marketing thing.”

Luke shrugged and pocketed the card. “Thanks, Mark.”

For the most part, the rest of the day was unremarkable, although Luke found himself dealing with some rude remarks from Runel and his friends when he got back to the Slytherin common rooms. Marissa shot back a couple of insults at them, but it was really sort of a halfhearted effort, whether because she thought they had come out clearly on top or well to the bottom that day, Luke couldn't tell. Maybe she just didn't care to play the other students' games.

That night, Luke dreamed about his father. For once it wasn't about the crash.

The next week or so went by with the kind of routineness inherent in schools everywhere. The highlight was the Transfigurations class where Runel managed to turn himself blue. He was still blue for the first flying lesson, much to the amusement of Madam Hooch, the flying instructor.

“Now, before we can get out into the wild blue yonder, we must learn how to properly mount our brooms, or we'll simply end up black and blue. Everyone, please find a broom.”  
By this point, most of the students not directly next to Runel were giggling. Hieronymus himself was looking very sour about the whole thing. He had, in fact, begun to fade by the time of the first flying lesson, but was still distinctly tinted.

Luke, Marissa, and Violet were all standing in a row, giggling at Runel's humiliation. Madam Hooch looked around at the students, smiled, and said, “Now, if we're all ready... hold your hand out above your broom and say, in a clear, firm voice, 'up.' And if the broom doesn't come up on your first try, that's no reason to get the blues, just try again.”

After the giggling fit from that comment had passed, Luke snapped “Up” at his broom and watched irritably as it stayed stubbornly rooted to the ground. At least Runel seemed to be having similar problems. In fact, although Luke managed to get his broom to his hand by the third try, Runel was still getting more and more frustrated by his fifth attempt.  
Violet leaned over and whispered, “I imagine he's swearing a blue streak under his breath,” and Luke burst out laughing.

Finally, the flustered boy managed to get his broom up and the field fell silent.

Luke liked flying. It was a kind of freedom, not having to touch the ground, and doing it on a broom was as close as he thought he'd ever get to flying unsupported. Quite apart from Madam Hooch's comments during the lesson, it was easily his favorite class so far, although he had to admit that Potions was a close second. Any teacher willing to talk for an hour about the funniest admissions made under the influence of truth serums was worth listening to.

Charms, on the other hand, was very nearly unpleasant. It wasn't so much that Professor Gills didn't like Luke. In fact, if anything, he liked him too much. Luke felt watched, and he would often be taken aside at the end of class for one trivial reason or another. If he was late to Herbology, it was usually because of Charms.

“I'm beginning to feel spied upon,” he commented during lunch one day.

“That'll pass,” Mark said. “Just try to avoid the third-floor corridor, with that Weasley memorial. I swear, his eyes follow you.”

“We're in a school of magic, Mark, they probably do. But I was talking about Gills,” Luke said.

“I think he's just being nice,” Marissa said. “You're the only muggle-born in Slytherin, and let's face it, you get teased.”

Luke rolled his eyes. “Oh yes, the whole mudblood thing. How often do I have to tell you that I don't care before you believe me? Besides, I have my own reasons for thinking he's got some... other motive.”

“Like what,” said Violet, who actually rather liked Professor Gills in spite of his coolness towards Gryffindors. “I suppose he has shifty eyes?”

“He's talking about the hat incident,” Marissa said. “He thinks Gills still suspects him of being some kind of sinister reincarnation of Voldemort.”

Luke very pointedly refused to comment on that. For one thing, it wasn't so much that Gills suspected as that he knew. For another, the sneaking suspicion was more of Harry Potter, who Luke was sure was still interested in keeping an eye on him. He was getting to the point of saying something about Potter when a muffled whump from next to him was followed by a piece of burning lettuce falling to the table.

Luke, Marissa, Violet, and Teddy all turned to stare at Mark, who was holding his wand pointed at his plate. There was a scorch mark on the plate itself, and a tiny piece of blackened bread.

“Oops,” Mark said. He squinted at his damaged sandwich. “To be fair though, I did manage to toast it. Kinda.”

“Why would you do that?” Luke asked, any thoughts of Potter temporarily vanished.

Mark grinned sheepishly. “Why not? I like toasted sandwiches.”

“Yeah,” Teddy said, “But you can't grow your eyebrows back on cue, and you're bad at charms.”

“I'm better than you are, Lupin,” Mark snapped.

“No you're not,” Teddy said. “You're practically a squib when it comes to charms.”

Before Luke could ask what a squib was, Mark had leapt over the table and tackled Teddy to the ground. Being small, he wasn't able to keep him there, but that didn't stop the little Hufflepuff from trying.

“What's your problem, Jonson?” Teddy exclaimed as he held off Mark.

All Mark would say in reply was “Take it back!” He kept trying to pummel Teddy until Luke stood up and cast a body-bind curse at him, at which point Mark couldn't keep trying to pummel Teddy no matter how much he wanted to.

After a moment or two of stunned silence, Luke said, “does anyone want to tell me what a squib is?”

\-----------------

Mark didn't talk to any of them for a week, and in fact, he started eating with the rest of the Hufflepuffs, even after he resumed saying hello in the corridors. Luke felt really sorry for him, since the Hufflepuffs didn't exactly like Mark any better than anyone else at the school. Mark had that special knack for being awkward and detached that makes people less than popular with their peers, and so he wound up apart from the main group no matter where he was. Of course, with classes getting into full swing, and quizzes and essays and learning how to turn a trombone into a trumpet (the key was to know exactly what a trumpet looks like, and furthermore to be good at transfigurations), Luke couldn't really devote much time to trying to retrieve his friendship with Mark. After all, it was hard enough maintaining a rivalry with Runel.

It wasn't until the end of October that Luke really spared any thought for Mark. The school was getting excitable. Halloween was coming up, and like any school full of properly raised youth, Hogwarts was abuzz with anticipation and a sudden influx of sweets.

Which was how Luke found himself with a half dozen chocolate frogs.

He didn't really want them. After all, they were halfway to being alive, and it was the half that was most unsettling. Yogurt, he could deal with. Things that squirmed, not so much. So there he sat, in the Slytherin common room on a Saturday afternoon, disenchanting chocolate frogs and taking the cards. Two Dumbledores, a Merlin, and a Piotr Varmussen later, he got up and headed out for some kind of adult advice.

He didn't have far to walk. The person he was looking for was in the dungeons. He knocked on Professor Leiman's office door and was told to come in.

Luke didn't really know what he'd been expecting, but it wasn't this. Professor Leiman sat in the middle of a nest of photographs, only about a quarter of them moving. Heavy slavic faces peered out from some, while others showed what looked like grizzled Germans or groups of pissed-off Frenchmen. Most of the magical photographs showed very Asian faces.

In one corner of the office was a low-slung, uncomfortable looking green cot with a blanket and a pillow. Next to it was a trunk covered in more personal photographs, all of them magical.

Professor Leiman himself was cleaning a gun. He didn't bother to look up when Luke came in. instead he just said, “I told you before, Harry, I'm sure.”

“I think you may have me confused with someone else, sir,” Luke said.

The professor jumped and stowed his gun in a drawer in his desk. “Luke! I am so sorry! I... well, I suppose you already guessed that I had you confused with someone else.”

“You thought I was Harry Potter, didn't you, sir?”

“That, young man, is between me and Harry Potter,” Professor Leiman said. “What can I do for you?”

Luke nodded. “Right. Um... well, I was hoping I could ask you for advice, actually.”

Professor Leiman blinked rapid-fire for a second and then nodded. “And what advice do you need?”

“Well,” Luke said, “I have this friend—“

“Is it not you?”

Luke stared at him for a second and then giggled as he got the joke. “There isn't a right answer to that, sir. It's Mark Jonson. You know, from Hufflepuff?” Leiman nodded, so Luke continued. “Well, there was this big fight that Mark had with the rest of us a couple of weeks ago, and he stopped talking to us, but now he looks really lonely whenever I see him.”

Professor Leiman nodded. “And you're wondering what the best way to further humiliate him is?”

Luke stared at him, not entirely sure that he'd heard properly. “I beg your pardon?”

“Well, that is the typical advice that a Slytherin would want,” Professor Leiman said. “But then, you are anything but typical. I suspect that the Sorting hat ought to have put you in Gryffindor or Hufflepuff, but was a bit too proud. You really want to know if I have any ideas on how best to win back his friendship. He's quite fond of hot cocoa, you could try that. Or if that's a bit of a stretch, you could always punch out someone who's harrassing him again, it seemed to work quite a treat last time. But I think your best bet would be to ask him what's troubling him so much.”

Luke sighed. He hadn't really learned anything new, aside from the hot cocoa thing, but at least his instincts were confirmed as right. Still, he would have to get to Mark, and Mark was probably in the Hufflepuff common room at the moment. “You don't happen to know where—“

“Luke, you would hardly be trying to learn where your friend's common room is. And, being a good teacher, it would hardly be like me to let slip that it's in the corridor near the kitchen, behind a large still life of a bowl of fruit, and that a solid knock or two on the painting should get someone to open the door for you.”

Professor Leiman smiled blandly, as though he was completely unaware of the information he'd just divulged.

“Of course, sir. Thank you.”

“Not at all, Mister Restimen. Thank you for thinking of me when you needed advice. I'm flattered.”

Luke stood up and walked out of the room, headed up the stairs to the kitchen corridor. He had a friend to remake.

He found the appropriate painting and knocked on the frame, then stood standing nervously outside. The whole scene reminded him of a young suitor waiting at a lady's door. He tried to put that thought out of his mind.

Just as he was about to knock again, the painting swung wide open and a very puzzled face appeared. Its owner was wearing prefect robes and looking somewhat suspicious, for which Luke couldn't blame him. It wasn't every day that someone knocked on the door to your common room. When he saw Luke, his expression brightened a touch. “If it isn't the Hero of Hufflepuff. What can I do for you?”

“I'm just looking for Mark Jonson,” Luke replied. He tried, with limited success, to push down that ridiculous sensation of waiting for a girl on her parents' front porch.

It got a little more difficult when the prefect pulled the painting closed and left Luke waiting in the corridor. It didn't get any easier, in fact, until the painting swung open and Mark was ejected at a not-inconsiderable speed. He glared at Luke for a second, then looked down at the floor.

“Have you been moping around the common room?” Luke asked.

“Well I don't see why I shouldn't,” Mark said. “My friends have all decided to stop talking to me, and now I imagine you've decided to hex me into next week.”

“Ignoring for a moment the fact that Professor Gills told us that time travel into the future is impossible, you have an overactive imagination, Mark.”

Mark shook his head, refusing to look up. “You're still not talking to me.” After a moment, it seemed to occur to him how stupid this was, and he added, “I mean, generally.”

“No,” Luke said, “You're not talking to us. It's a pretty big difference, really.”

Mark looked up, squinted at Luke as though to say, “I'm listening.”

“We were all really confused when you jumped on Teddy like that,” Luke said. “And then you just stopped talking to us. Do you want to explain that?”

Mark turned the most delightfully illustrative shade of red. “Not here,” he said. “Can we go find somewhere a little more... private?”

“All right,” Luke said. “But no hands, I'm not that kind of girl.”

Mark gave him a puzzled look, but followed him anyways. Luke led him up to the first floor and deeper into the castle. He found a disused classroom and they ducked into it. “All right,” Luke said. “Spill it.”

Mark nodded and seemed about to turn and leave the room for a moment, but then he screwed up his courage and said, “I'm a squib.”

“You're awfully magical for all that,” Luke replied.

Mark sighed. “I knew you wouldn't get it. My uncle is an explorer, and he sent me this thing last year.” He pulled on a string around his neck, and out popped a glass bead about the size of a marble, mounted in a sculptured metal talon. “He found it in some ancient Chinese ruins. As long as I'm wearing it, I can do magic. We had to send a letter to Hogwarts, and Professor Flitwick said that it was okay for me to attend.”

“So that's why you went off on Teddy like that? Because he was... kinda right?”

Mark nodded. “Yeah. I shouldn't have done it.”

“No, you really shouldn't,” Luke said. “But if you'd just explained...”

“I can't though,” Mark said. “I'm not supposed to be telling you this much. Professor Flitwick said that if people knew I had such a powerful artifact there'd be a huge fuss over it, and I should be able to get my schooling in peace. But now I've gone and told you, and I'm going to get kicked out.”

The boy was beginning to veer off towards a breakdown. Luke shook his head. “You're not going to be expelled, Mark. I'm the one who bullied it out of you, and besides that, I can keep a secret. Nobody has to know that I know.”

Mark looked up, hope trying its best to make itself visible in his eyes. “Are you sure?” he squeaked the words out.

Luke nodded and tossed an arm over Mark's shoulder. “Mark, my friend, I'm positive.”

\-----------------

The following morning, at breakfast, Luke explained to Teddy that Mark was just a bit sensitive about squib comments because his favorite cousin was a squib. Teddy seemed to buy the story, and with that, Mark was back at the table and the group was happy and complete, which Luke thought was a bit ominous, because he wasn't usually this happy and there had to be a catch. Marissa told him he was just being a pessimist, but Luke didn't think that was it.

“You know,” she said as they were sitting in the common room one day, “if you'd just relax and enjoy yourself, you'd be a lot happier.”

Luke shook his head and looked up from his Potions essay (which chemical element is the most common in love potions and why?).

“I'm sorry, were we talking about this again and I didn't notice?”

Marissa shook her head. “You don't relax. Especially lately. It's like you're always trying to be a good student, and a good friend, and a teacher's pet. I'm a little surprised you never tried out for the quidditch team.”

Luke paused and thought about this. A blotch of ink dropped onto his paper and he put his pen away.

“Do you really think so?”

“Yeah,” Marissa said. “It's like you're trying to prove yourself, although I couldn't say why if I tried.”

“All right, fair enough,” Luke said. “Why mention this just now?”

“Because,” Marissa said, “It's Halloween and there's a big feast in ten minutes and you're still in ink-stained robes, writing an essay.”

Luke swore softly and rushed to the dorms to change out of his dirty robes. Even so, he was late to the Halloween banquet. The Great Hall was decked out with floating Jack-o-lanterns, and the tables were draped with their house colors, as well and black and orange cloths. The entire student body was seated by houses, so Luke just looked around for Marissa and rushed to take a seat before the spot closed up.

When he settled down next to Marissa, she seemed very excited about something. “What's going on?” he asked.

“Harry Potter is here!” Marissa exclaimed, pointing up at the staff table, where, indeed, Potter was seated between Professors Flitwick and Longbottom, apparently sharing a joke.

“Oh lord,” Luke mumbled, and he tried to hunch down, but it's very hard to hunch down much further than a seated position without sliding under the table.

“What's wrong, Luke,” Marissa asked.

“I don't like Harry Potter,” Luke replied.

“That's got to be about the smartest thing you've ever said, Restimen,” a voice said from over the table. When Luke looked up to see who was speaking, he found Hieronymus Runel sitting down approximately across from him. “After all, whatever else Potter's done, he's still a Gryffindor and a twit.”

“Better than a Slytherin and a full-blown idiot,” Luke said. “I mean, at least he doesn't have to deal with the shame of being from the same house as you.”

Runel made a gesture that most students would not be brave enough to make within view of the staff table. “Don't be such a prat, Restimen. You're not exactly the cream of the crop here.”

Luke was about to reply when Runel jumped and yelped. “Ow! What was that for?”

Luke shrugged. “I didn't do a thing, Hieronymus. You must be imagining things.”

Runel glared at him for a moment and then went back to his meal.

“You're welcome, by the way,” Marissa said.

Luke grinned. “You hexxed him, didn't you?”

“Inflictus. Gotta love it. So, why don't you like Harry Potter?”

Luke sighed. This was going to be a tough one.

“I've told you before, he's frightening. And I get the feeling that he doesn't like me. Like even though Professor Leiman cleared me, he still doesn't trust me.”

Marissa shrugged. “Look at it from his point of view. He lost everything to Voldemort. Friends, his parents, his teachers, very nearly his life. He's probably afraid that Professor Leiman was wrong.”

“But he wa—wait, how do you know that Professor Leiman had anything to do with it?”

Marissa flushed and fixed her gaze on a spot slightly to the left of her plate. “I was really curious about what happened, so I sorta told him I was worried that you were lying about the hat being wrong.”

“And?”

“And he told me that he checked for himself and you're just an ordinary boy, like any other, and the hat must have been confused.”

“There's several things about that that I'm not quite sure how much I like,” Luke said.

“I'm sorry,” Marissa said. “It was way back at the beginning of the school year. At the end of the second day!”

Luke shook his head and went back to his meal. Clearly, Marissa didn't quite understand, and she didn't know anything she shouldn't, so he wasn't going to say anything more about it, and he was going to try not to be angry.

He didn't know how well he'd do on that last one.

As he got up from the table at the end of the feast, Luke was sure Harry Potter was watching him. It was an unsettling feeling to say the least. For one thing, he was almost   
positive that he was the only one who would feel so uncomfortable about this. After all, it was sort of like saying that you were sure you were being watched by the Prime Minister. Even if you were, how would you get anyone to believe you? And even if you got past that obstacle... well, that was where the analogy broke down, Luke thought. After all, the Prime Minister might well be up to something nefarious. He was a politician, not the man who'd been so good at being a human being in general that he'd defeated what amounted, if Luke had his history right, to Hitler 2: This Time It's Magical.

As he left the Great Hall, Luke could feel Potter's eyes on his back. It didn't matter. Nobody would believe him.

The next morning at breakfast, there was an owl for Luke, which wasn't exactly surprising. After all, his mother liked to keep in touch, and had taken to the owl post with the sort of delighted mania that was most often reserved for, say, cocaine. Still, this particular owl was carrying not a letter, but a package. It landed on the table and gave Luke a sort of a surly look, as though it now had two faces to associate with this thing it had been made to carry, and could officially begin plotting its vengeance.

The package, when Luke opened it up, turned out to be filled with sweets. And a note.

Luke,  
don't know if you'll get the chance to have candy on Halloween there at Hogwarts, so I'm sending along a little care package for you. I found most of these at that delightful wizarding candy shop Mister Westcott showed us. I think the blood pops must be cherry flavored, but watch out for the every-flavor beans: they're serious.  
Love, Mummsy.

Luke drew a lollipop in a bloodred wrapper out of the little pile. Somehow, he wasn't so sure it was cherry flavored. It might have had something to do with the disgusted look on Violet's face.

“I'm guessing,” she said, “that that's from your mother.” Luke nodded. “Well, don't eat those ones, they're blood-flavored. Mother has a story about how her mum once sent her a howler because she thought the red paper was pretty and it was around Christmastime. There she was, at Rainpath Academy, top of the class, very popular student, and then she gets this howler out of nowhere that screams her mother's entire letter to her, complete with 'love, mummy' at the end. Of course she was mortified, but what can you really do after that? She says she sent a howler explaining what they do and she never got another one after that.”

“And... what exactly do they do?” Luke asked.

“Oh,” Violet said. “Well, I mean, I sort of just said. They scream the letter at you. They're really for when you're angry and trying to yell at someone.”

“Very angry,” Marissa put in.

Not to be outdone, Teddy added “Very, very angry. What are we talking about?”

Luke sighed. “You really have got to learn to wake up in the morning, Teddy. We're talking about howlers.”

“Oh. Well then very, very, very angry.”

“My aunt once used all capital letters and exclamation points on one,” Mark said. “My cousin Jimmy couldn't hear anything for days.”

Luke put another tick behind his theory that magic led to insanity.

\---------------

For the most part, life at Hogwarts continued as normal. The quidditch season started, and Luke suddenly wished he'd tried out for the team. It looked like the most fun, fast-paced sport imaginable, even if there were malevolent, extremely heavy-looking balls flying everywhere trying to throw people to the ground from a hundred and fifty feet in the air. Whether or not he'd be good at any of the positions, Luke had his doubts, but he'd still like to learn. The first game was Gryffindor versus Slytherin, and Luke was less than pleased to spot Harry Potter in the stands with the faculty. He seemed to be talking to Professor Shelly, who was regarding him, Luke was delighted to see, with a tolerant expression that nonetheless seemed to mean she'd rather be paying attention to the game than to some nitwit nattering in her ear.

Potter's presence wasn't guaranteed at games, but he seemed to be a fan of the sport, and of the game as played at Hogwarts in particular, and although there weren't many matches played before the weather turned too wintery to keep playing, there were enough that Luke decided it wasn't worth going if he had to divide his attention between the game and looking to see when he was being watched. Ultimately, he thought (and Marissa told him he was being very Ravenclaw, though Teddy tried to protest that a Ravenclaw would never abandon their house for something so trivial), Luke decided that quidditch matches were a perfect time to catch up on his reading. He'd brought some Stephen King books and hadn't even had time to open them yet.

The news he had of the quidditch matches became condensed to who won and if Harry Potter was there, but given that he'd never paid that much attention to sports in the first place, he really didn't mind.

In retrospect, that might not have been the best idea.

The first week of December, at the end of one of her Defense Against the Dark Arts classes, Professor Shelly managed to say the one thing that would make Luke not look forward to her class.

“We'll be having a special guest for a couple of classes after the holiday,” she announced. “I'm pleased to inform you that Harry Potter will be lecturing on the subject of shield charms during his lesson with the first years.”

Luke tried not to groan too obviously over that one. It would have drawn quite a bit of attention to him.

“Now, obviously, such an important guest is to be treated with respect, and his time is valuable, so I won't be allowing students to ask him about his experiences during the fight against Tom Riddle.” When this was met with groans, Professor Shelly added, “Instead, I will place a box on my desk, into which you may each put no more than one question for him. Mister Potter has agreed to answer each of those questions, so long as they are appropriate and not about the recent rumors regarding his wife, which he assures me are all false.” She looked around the room, making sure to impress this point on her students, and then dismissed the class.

The entire room became very loud as the students all began discussing what to ask Harry Potter. Luke had a feeling that, at least, Potter would regret this particular method of spying, especially given the sound of some of the Slytherins' whispers. Still, he was less than enthusiastic about the upcoming debacle, and was already trying to think of ways to get out of it.

But, there was still the Christmas break to get through before he had to really start worrying about that.

“So, what are you going to ask him?” Marissa's voice didn't so curious so much as it sounded resigned.

Luke stared at her and waited for the gears to tick over in his brain to the same conclusion she'd made. “You know,” he said, “that's actually not a half-bad idea.”  
“Oh no. No, you are not asking Harry Potter if he's having you watched!”

At her sudden outburst a number of heads turned to stare at Luke, Violet, and Marissa. Luke waved at them and conversation around the three slowly resumed. At least it was taking a bizarre outburst like that these days to get people to pay attention to the odd group of interhouse friends. Luke shook his head. “I doubt he'd tell me if he was. But you know, if he is, then he knows that I know now.”

“What evidence do you have,” Marissa protested as they left the classroom.

“I don't have evidence, but... I mean, the last time he was here this often was because he was trying to get a good grade on his lizards, or whatever you crazy magic-people keep calling those tests of yours.”

“N.E.W.T., Luke,” Marissa said, “And Harry Potter didn't take his here, he took them privately at the ministry—“

“Because he hadn't formally attended his last year at Hogwarts, I know.” Luke let out a gruff, irritated sigh. “I just can't talk about some things with you, Marissa.”

“Because those things are your insane conspiracy theories, yes!”

“Oh, come off it, Marissa,” Violet said. “You know, you're the only one in your entire house who's got such a case of hero-worship for Potter. He did one thing eleven years ago that was really cool, and that's it. I don't think Luke is that far off. After all, it would make sense for Harry Potter of all people to jump so hard at what the hat said.”

Luke rolled his eyes and walked away. He could deal with this particular argument some other time. Marissa and Violet tried to chase after him at first, but he waved them away. He didn't want to talk to them, he wanted to talk to Mark. Mark, at least, would pay attention to what he was saying, and not just to tell him he was being ridiculous. Violet and Marissa basically agreed on that point.

He found Mark in the entrance hall, eating a peppermint-speckled chocolate frog, de-animated, of course, and talking to Teddy.

“Hey,” he said.

Teddy gave him a sideways sort of a look. “You look irritated, Luke. Has Violet been singing that stupid old song again?”

“No,” Luke said, “And you know perfectly well that it doesn't irritate me at all. As I recall, the student it refers to is a Gryffindor and so I'm not allowed to irritated. I'm supposed to   
think it's hilarious.”

“Sounds like you've got a bee in your bonnet about something else, then. Don't tell me it's the hat incident again.”

“It's not the hat incident,” Luke snapped. “It's Potter! He's coming to be a guest teacher for Defense Against the Dark Arts!”

“Oh, yeah!” Mark said. “I'm really excited for that! You know we get to ask him questions!”

Luke gave him a venomous stare and Mark shut up.

“This is not a good thing, Mark.”

“I think it is,” Teddy said. “I mean, he is my godfather and all that—“

“Yes, Teddy, which is exactly why I don't want to discuss this with you, please leave.”

Teddy took a moment to give Luke a venomous look of his own and then turned and walked away.

“That wasn't very nice,” Mark said.

“I'm a Slytherin, we're supposed to be insufferable bastards,” Luke retorted. “Look, you're not here to offer ideas, and I don't need any sympathy, I just want to vent without looking crazy.”

“You'll have to start by not thinking that Potter's... you know... stalking you.”

Luke sighed. “ But what if he is?”

“Well then that's good, provided you're not planning on becoming the next Dark Lord or something.”

“For one thing, if I were to go evil, I'd much rather set up a false democracy and call myself the president, it sounds nicer. For another, if Potter's having me followed, it's because he's paranoid and therefore not mentally stable and so I can't rely on him to not do something crazy like try to throw me in prison for wearing too much black, and from what I hear your wizarding prisons are way worse than anything science could predict is possible, and what's more, he's bloody Potter, he could get away with it!”

Mark stared at him for a moment. “I wonder if you realize just how crazy that sounded.”

“I know perfectly well, and that's what's getting to me, because I'm absolutely convinced that he's up to no good.”

Mark opened his mouth, seemed to think about this for a moment, and then said, “I suppose this would be a bad time to bring up the concept that he might just be convinced of the same thing about you.”

“Of course he is,” Luke snapped. “The difference between us is that he can throw the weight of the Auror Office at me if he wants to, and I have a wand and might be able to really make his kneecaps hurt if I'm really, exceptionally fast in a duel.”

“I suppose you'd better not duel him, then.”

And this suggestion was about as close to good advice as Luke could come to getting from Mark on the subject. He would have consulted his mother on the subject, but she would then have gone to the authorities, and then there would have been newspapers, and newspapers had headlines, and still nothing would get done, because then there would be headlines about the crazy boy who thought that Potter was stalking him.


	3. Chapter 3

The ride back to King's Cross Station to go home for the Christmas break was a boisterous affair, with five of them in one compartment. Luke could tell right away that five of them would not fit by seventh year, which was too bad, because he liked his friends.

He tried to put aside any and all thought of worry and just enjoy the ride. It wasn't easy. Between wondering if his mother would treat him differently after the news that he had some extra soul to him and wondering if Potter would be having him followed over the holiday... well, it wasn't easy to relax. Still...

He swapped chocolate frog cards with Mark and Teddy, he discussed the charms and transfigurations essays with Marissa, he played a game of Exploding Snap with Violet, and they all laughed and talked and just generally had fun, and he was almost disappointed when the train slowed to a halt and they had to get off at the station.

Luke stepped off the train and there was his mother, sitting on a bench on the platform, looking nervous, next to a witch with a bright red robe.

She spotted him and stood up with her arms flung wide. He jogged over as fast as he could while dragging a trunk and two suitcases, which wasn't very fast at all.

She greeted him and helped him take his things out to the car, and they piled in, and that was when she started really talking. “So, what's it like? Hogwarts, I mean.”

Luke shrugged. “It's... it's weird. The halls change based on which day it is, and they have this game that they play on broomsticks.” He thought for a moment. “But it's a lot of fun, too. I like it.”

“And this whole Voldemort... thing?”

Luke shrugged. “I don't feel any different. I mean, it's not like I heard about it and thought, 'oh, now I want to take over the world.'”

“Well, of course not, dear, it's just that you must think something about it.”

“I think I don't want it to have any effect on me. I'm not Voldemort, I'm me.”

His mother smiled. “Well, of course you're not Voldemort. You're Luke Restimen, just like always.”

Yeah, Luke thought. Tell that to Harry Potter.

When he got home, Luke dragged his trunk to his room and his mother brought his suitcases, and he got settled in for the Christmas break and he pointedly refused to discuss the whole Voldemort thing.

His mother had set up a Christmas tree in the living room, and there were already a few gifts under it, ready to be opened on Christmas day. She gave him a cup of tea and told him she was happy to have him back for the holiday, and all was well with the world.

Over the next few days, wrapped packages arrived from Marissa, Violet, Mark, and even, to Luke's surprise, Professor Leiman. Teddy, Luke figured, was being a bit slow about finding a gift.

And then came the twenty-third. There was a knock on the door, and Luke's mother answered it and then let out a delighted little noise and called “Luke, we have a guest!”

This was puzzling. Aside from his mother, Luke's closest living relative was a great aunt who resided either in Norway or Sweden, Luke honestly could not recall which. There was nobody who would be visiting so close to Christmas. Luke popped his head out of his room, where he'd been reading from his potions book, and he saw Teddy stepping into the apartment. His hair was streaked with red and green today.

A man's voice was saying to Luke's mother, “A happy Christmas to you, Mrs, Restimen.”

Something about all this was a little off, but Luke couldn't quite place it until he wandered out of his room and saw that the man speaking was Harry Potter.

Oh dear.

“Luke!” Teddy exclaimed, and Potter's head snapped around to cast a critical eye at Luke. Luke waved to Teddy, who ran over and seemed to stop just short of throwing himself at Luke for a hug. The boy was far too enthusiastic.

“Oh, good, Luke, you're not still in your pajamas. This is Harry Potter, Luke.”

“I know,” Luke replied. “We've met.” A cold feeling was running across his spine. Against all his better judgement, Luke's hindbrain was screaming that the enemy was right there, the lion had slipped into the cave, it was time to get out, to run, to scream and flee.

“Hello, Luke,” Potter said. “I hope you're well.”

“Oh,” Luke said. “Um. Quite well, sir.”

Potter was carrying a small, brightly wrapped package, and this he handed to Teddy, who gave a surprised little start and said “Oh, right!” He took the package over to Luke. “It took a while to pick out a gift for you, and then I thought maybe I could give it to you in person. But when I asked my grandmother to take me, she said she was busy today, so—“

“So your godfather gave you a lift,” Luke finished for him. He had a feeling that Harry Potter would have wound up at his home eventually one way or another.

Potter was sitting on the couch by now, talking to Annalee as though she were an old friend. It occurred to Luke that his mother knew that Harry Potter was a celebrity and a hero and nothing else about the man. He didn't like this.

He directed Teddy to put the present under the tree and restrained an urge to question his friend about what, exactly, he was thinking. Instead, Luke said, “Would you like something to drink, Teddy? Mister Potter?”

Potter shook his head, but Teddy smiled and asked what there was.

“I'm not actually sure,” Luke said, though he knew, in fact, exactly what there was. “Let's go see.”

He led Teddy into the kitchen and opened up the refrigerator. “So, what are you really doing here?”

Teddy didn't say anything to that, and when Luke emerged from the fridge with a jug of fruit juice, Teddy was staring at him. “What on earth are you talking about, Luke? I'm here to give you your Christmas gift.”

Luke shook his head. “Never mind. I'm sorry, it's just a bit... it's really jarring to have him show up here.”

A devastated look crossed over Teddy's face. “Oh, no. I'm so sorry, I didn't even think about that.”

“That's because you're a Ravenclaw and therefore too busy thinking about books all the time,” Luke replied, forcing himself to grin.

“I deserved that,” Teddy said.

“You absolutely did,” Luke said.

The rest of Potter's visit was just as deeply uncomfortable. Although he didn't quite grill Luke like a captured criminal, his questions were still probing and seemed multilayered. Things like “what's your favorite class” seemed like their answers would be compared to Potter's internal model for Voldemort, and if the two matched too closely, there would be hell to pay.

Still worse, Potter interviewed Luke's mother with great enthusiasm. He seemed especially interested in Luke's father, and probed gently at that subject a number of times, until it seemed that he knew almost as much as Luke himself.

He finally departed with a cheery “Happy Christmas” an hour or so later, and Luke's mother seemed completely delighted by her brush with celebrity.

“Isn't he just charming,” she said. It wasn't a question.

Luke agreed that yes, Potter most certainly was charming. After all, what else could he say?

That night, he dreamed that Harry Potter was still in the house, and wouldn't go away. No matter how much Luke hinted that he wasn't wanted, there Potter sat, drinking a cup of tea, unmoving save for his hand making regular trips to bring the cup to his lips.

He was unsettled and antsy all throughout Christmas Eve, and when his mother asked him about it, all Luke could say was that he hadn't slept well. Technically, it was true.

Christmas day, on the other hand, was a bright little break from the world. Luke got a couple of books, a wand-care kit, and a decent pair of shoes from his mother. If the presents had been his main concern, he might almost have been disappointed, but he was glad to have friends who knew him well enough to get him books instead of electronics (not, Luke mused, that most pureblooded wizards knew what electronics were).

Luke's mother put on a CD of Christmas music and cooked a pie, and Luke started reading Frank Herbert's Dune, which Violet had given him, and all was well with the world.  
It would be nice if, just sometimes, things would stay that way.

\------------------

“You know, Luke, there's no reason to dread this. You'll see. He'll come in, lecture us about shield charms, and then he'll answer a few questions and it'll be over.”

“And the whole time,” Luke replied evenly, “He'll be watching me, waiting for me to slip up.”

Marissa rolled her eyes. “But you won't 'slip up,' because you're not Voldemort, you're Luke, and you aren't here to take over the world, you're here to learn magic. Therefore, you have nothing to worry about.”

“Except that he's watching me. It's weird, Marissa.”

Luke sat at the back of the classroom. He knew perfectly well that it might be taken as a sign that he was trying to avoid Potter, but then... well, he was trying to avoid Potter, so he might as well be good at avoiding Potter.

Professor Shelly stood up at the front of the class, looking bouncy and excited, as though she had just been given the opportunity to introduce James Earl Jones to a classroom full of Star Wars fans.

“Students, as you all know, we have a special guest today to talk about the best methods for learning to cast shield charms. Please say hello to Harry Potter.”

This had been rehearsed beforehand, and Professor Shelly had made sure to take preventative measures so that her students wouldn't do anything embarrassing. Still, the atmosphere in the room was enough to make Luke half-expect someone to throw a pair of panties to the teacher's desk. Once the class was calm enough to learn things that didn't begin with the words “oh my god, Harry Potter is”, Potter smiled and said, “Well, it's nice to see that Hogwarts is still taking its job seriously. Are we all ready to learn how to cast a shield charm?”

There were nervous nods around the classroom. “Good,” Potter said. “Now, I'm going to need an assistant to show you how to do this properly. And just to keep you all on your toes, I'll choose him from the back of the room.” A sense of creeping doom crawled down Luke's spine as Potter's finger—of course—pointed directly to him. “You there, you'll do. Restimen, right?”

Luke nodded and stood up. He could try to refuse, but there was really no point in it. He'd just have to not do anything wrong. At all. Whatsoever. No matter what. Even if he didn't know it was wrong.

Perfect.

“Well, Mister Restimen,” Potter said as Luke stepped up to face him in front of the class. “How are we doing today?”

Luke mumbled something to the effect that he was all right, and Harry Potter, not seeming really to care all that much, said, “All right then. Now, Mister Restimen, you and I are going to have a duel. Don't worry, I won't hurt you, but I will win this duel, using nothing more than shield charms. Are you ready?”

Luke nodded grimly. He'd give Potter about fifty-fifty odds of having honest intentions here. Between pretending that he'd never met Luke before and then challenging an eleven-year-old child to a duel, Luke trusted Potter about as far as he could throw him. Without magic.

“Then let's begin,” Potter said. “Protego!”

Luke fired off a stunning hex, which, of course, splattered uselessly against the shield. Potter backed off a step and then took a sudden step forward and snapped “Refrectus!”

Another stunning hex, but this one didn't splat helplessly against the shield. It went through, but tore itself apart as it crossed the shield, coming out on the other side as a spray of red light that made Potter wince. “Again! Rebondi!”

A third shield, and Potter stood waiting. “Well?”

“I read about that spell, sir,” Luke said, “and I'd rather not stun myself, if it's all the same to you. I concede, you've won.”

Potter looked a bit sour at that, but at that point, what could he do, Imperius the boy? “Very well, Mister Restimen, I see you've been studying to prepare for this lesson.”

“Actually sir, I read in the library sometimes.”

“Are you sure you're a Slytherin?” Potter asked. “That sounds rather Ravenclaw to me.” Most of the class laughed at that. Luke didn't think it was all that funny. “Anyways, Mister Restimen, yes, you did your research right. Rebondi is the most dangerous of the shield charms, as it can reflect an attack right back at the attacker as long as their magic isn't strong enough to stop that. Can anyone here think of a good defense to use against it?”

“Rebondi!” shouted a voice from near the middle of the classroom.

“That's a good thought,” Potter said. “Let's try it out. Mister Restimen, if you would cast the charm, please?”

Luke felt as though this must be some sort of a trap. Perhaps Voldemort had been particularly fond of the spell. Of course, Luke had a fairly sure defense against falling into the trap if that was the case. “I'm afraid I haven't learned how yet, sir.”

“Really,” Potter said. “Perhaps you are a Slytherin, after all. Very well, I'll teach you.”

And with that, Potter stepped over and took Luke's wand hand in his own. He paused for a moment, as though he expected something to happen, and then carefully guided Luke's fingers through the motions, one, two, three times, until Luke said he was sure he'd got it. Finally, Potter stepped back.

“All right then, Mister Restimen, go ahead.”

Luke took a deep breath, slid his fingers down the length of his wand, pointing his middle finger down its length at Potter, and with an overhanded throwing gesture, snapped, “Rebondi!”

The shield went up in front of Luke, strong and glittering. Potter nodded approvingly and cast his counterspell.

“Stupefy, rebondi!”

Luke had almost doubted that Potter would get the shield up in time, and indeed, he almost didn't. Instead, the stunner clearly hit the shield, went right through it, and caught Potter full in the face, sending him flying back across the classroom, where he came to rest slumped against the wall. Luke swallowed a deeply inappropriate urge to let loose a triumphant cackle. That would probably not help his cause any.

Professor Shelly ran over to Potter and snapped, “Rennervate.”

Potter's eyes came open and shook his head. “Thank you, Shelly.” He turned to the class. “Any other ideas? No? Then I'll tell you. You don't counter the charm. Mister Restimen, if you would please cast the spell again, and this time kindly keep it up for as long as possible.”

Despite feeling like he was being run through a series of magical tests to guage his power, Luke recast the shield charm, and about three minutes later, with the strain showing visibly on his face, he let it collapse. Potter nodded his satisfaction. “That was well done. You kept it up a bit longer than most first-year students could have. You may go back to your seat.”

Luke headed back to his desk. He could feel Potter's eyes on his back the whole way.

“You know—redesci—it's not that bad,” Marissa said. “I mean, really, what were you expecting, torture? Redesci. Oh come on, change, damn you.”

Luke reached over and tapped her mouse with his wand. “Redesci,” he said, and watched in satisfaction as it turned into a baby mouse. “It felt like I was being tested, Marissa. I mean, first he checks the power of my stunning spells, and then he sees how quickly I pick up new spells, and then he checks how long it takes me to drain myself completely? How does that not seem nefarious to you?”

“It wasn't nefarious,” Marissa said irritably. “He was teaching you how to use shield charms.”

“And what about when he touched me? I've read the books in the library, and do you know what happened when he touched Quirinus Quirrel?”

“Who?”

“Quirinus Quirrel. He was the Defense professor in Potter's first year, possessed by—“

“Oh, yeah, possessed by Voldemort. That's really obscure, Luke, and nobody knows if that story is even true...”

“It was like he was checking. I was almost surprised he didn't go 'huh' or something.”

“Are you seriously trying to convince me that Harry Potter checked to see if his touch would dissolve you?”

Luke thought about this question for a second or two and then said, “Well, when you come right down to it... yes.”

Marissa made a noise of extreme disgust and turned away from him, raising her hand. “Professor Orkney! I need a new mouse!”

Professor Orkney looked over and saw her mouse, then peered into his little box of mice and said, “Very well, Miss Jones. Do try not to let Mister Restimen transfigure your next one, as well.”

With a flick of the teacher's wand, a very confused mouse was sitting on the table in front of Marissa. “How did he know?” she snapped.

“You would have been able to transfigure it back if you had done the original transfiguration,” Luke said.

“Oh. Right.”

\--------------------

Mark proved to be more willing to listen to Luke's theories about being tested, but not to the point that he thought Potter was definitely up to something.

Luke caught up with him out in the grounds, where Mark was practicing a snowball-rolling spell on the thin layer of snow on the ground. It was getting mostly mud and twigs, which was potentially hilarious, but not exactly in the spirit of snowball fights. Luke, on the other hand, just reached down and scooped up some snow from where it was a little thicker in the castle's shadow. One good toss was enough to get Mark's attention, and the Hufflepuff looked up and smiled as though he didn't have a ball of ice slowly soaking through his robes.

“Hey, Mark!” Luke shouted. “You know, hands usually work better for that sort of thing than wands do.”

Mark sighed and gave up his attempts. “I was just trying to see how well it works when there isn't much snow. So how was Potter?”

“You mean you haven't heard? I knocked out The Boy Who Lived.”

“Oh no,” Mark said. “What did you do?”

“Relax. He was demonstrating the rebondi charm and he had me use it to show people how you can't just bounce a spell between two rebondi shields until one of you can't hold it up anymore. In fact, he used me to demonstrate all of the charms he taught us about. It was like he was testing me.”

“Is this about Voldemort?” Mark asked.

“Yeah, it is. I suppose you're going to storm away and tell me that I'm being stupid now?”

Mark shook his head. “No. I just wanted to make sure I knew. So what, you think he was trying to compare you to Voldemort?”

Luke shrugged. “Voldemort was a really, really powerful guy, right? What if he was just testing to see if I'm as powerful as Voldemort was at my age?”

“Well that wouldn't make any sense,” Mark said. “I mean, he only knew Voldemort at the height of his power. He'd have been better off asking... I dunno, Hagrid.”

“Hagrid?” Luke said.

“Yeah. Hagrid was around when Voldemort was at Hogwarts, I thought you knew—where are you off to?”

\--------------------

Luke knocked on the door of the groundskeeper's hut and waited impatiently, hopping from one foot to the other, until it opened on the vast form of the groundskeeper.

“Hullo?”

“Mister Hagrid?” Luke said.

“Yeah, what can I do fer ye?”

Luke thought for a moment about how best to phrase his question. “Mister Hagrid, did you ever meet Voldemort?”

Rubeus Hagrid stared at Luke for a few moments, then let out a loud sigh. “I was hopin' ye wouldn' come around. All right, you might as well come in.”

After a greeting like that, Luke wasn't sure he wanted to come in, but he did so anyways, and the half-giant sat him down at the table. “Charlie's off getting' some firewood fer me, so we've got a while to talk. Why don't we start with introductions, since I'm sure you don' remember me at all. I'm Rubeus Hagrid, but pretty much everyone calls me just Hagrid.”

“Well, Mister... uh, that is, Hagrid... I'm Luke Restimen, and you can call me Luke if you want to, or Mister Restimen if you really have to.”

“Luke will do just fine,” Hagrid said. “An' do you mind if I ask why you're suddenly so curious about You-Know-Who?”

“Well, Hagrid,” Luke said, “I'm not sure if I should tell you. I mean, I don't know if you know anything about the reasons I might have...”

“Oh,” Hagrid said. “Don' you go worryin' abou' that. Professor Flitwick told me enough.”

“Then would you mind telling me what you know?”

Hagrid raised an eyebrow. “My, you are a Slytherin, an' no doubt abou' that. All righ'. I know that the Sortin' Hat said somethin' that seemed to mean it thought you were You-Know-Who. O' course, the heads o' house all got together an' did some investigatin', and Professor Leiman said you were... well, I don' rightly know the word fer it, but he said you had a bit of You-Know-Who's soul stuck to ye. An' then Professor Flitwick came an' he talked to me, 'cause he figured you were clever enough to figure out that I knew You-Know-Who, so he thought you migh' come an' talk to me. An' he told me not to tell you abou' this, but I feel like I ought to, 'cause it's not right not to tell someone abou' stuff like this, so I'm tellin' you right now that after I've talked to you I've got to go and tell him that you came to talk to me, an' I'm to make sure that Harry Potter knows, too.”

Tempting though it was to ask about his assignment to Potter, Luke thought that that might not be the right move. “All right, then, so... what did you think of Vol... of You-Know-Who?” He corrected himself mid-word as he saw Hagrid begin to flinch at the name.

“Well, he was a right jerk, I can tell you that! O' course, at the time, I didn' know he was goin' to become the Dark Lord or nothin'... well, I s'pose nobody did. But I mean, I had to be told they were the same person later. He didn' seem like he was as bad as all that. Just the worst Slytherin I ever met. Er, beggin' yer pardon, I don' mean no insult to the rest o' yer house.”

“Oh, no, sir, I understand,” Luke said. “They can be a collection of wrongheaded imbeciles at times.”

Hagrid nodded thoughtfully. “Righ'” he said. “An' he'd say things like that, sometimes, too. Usin' words that make people sound smart no matter who they are. I remember, he had all the school rules memorized—wound up on the wrong side o' that one meself once, came pretty near ruinin' me fer good. He was always suckin' up to the teachers, that one.”  
Luke nodded. “Sir, do you think I'm anything like him?”

Hagrid paused and thought about that for a few moments.

“Well, Luke, you'll have to keep in mind, I don' know you that well. But... well, I've seen you out on the grounds. That Hufflepuff feller you hang around with, the sorta quiet, nervous guy... he's not the sort that You-Know-Who woulda ever paid any mind to. An' yer other friends are a bit of an odd crew fer that, too, excep' fer that Jones girl. If it was just her, I'd be worried, but you hang around with all o' them others, too. An' you know, You-Know-Who was a star pupil in his day, best studen' around, everybody said he'd do great things. You seem... well, you seem average, maybe a bit brighter than most, but not some kinda genius. Actually, you remind me a bit o' Harry Potter, expecially with that scar on yer head.”

“That's from a car accident, sir,” Luke said, “And I don't like to talk about it.”

“Oh. Well, I'm sorry about that.” Hagrid glanced out the window and sat a little more upright. “Look alive, Luke, I think Charlie's back.”

And indeed, there was a man approaching outside, limping slightly. He had a wand extended in his right hand and was trailing a pile of wood in the air behind him. Luke's first impression of the man outside the window was that he had the most absurdly red hair Luke had ever seen (except for on Teddy, of course, who simply had the most absurd hair he'd ever seen, period). Something about the way he moved was a bit off, as though he was expecting his left side to be heavier.

The man directed the wood over to the pile next to the hut, almost doubling it in size, and then circled around to the front door and opened it up. He stood framed in the doorway for a few moments before it registered for Luke that the man was short exactly one limb.

“Oh, hello, Hagrid. I didn't realize we had company today.”

“Charlie,” Hagrid said, “This is Luke Restimen. Luke, Charlie Weasley. He used to work with dragons, you know.” Hagrid said this last with great respect, as though it was the mark of a truly superlative human being rather than, say, a sign of madness.

“Really?” Luke said, trying to sound interested rather than as though he wanted to find a way to ecape. Clearly, the dragon-tamer was mad. The evidence was right there; he was a dragon-tamer.

“Oh, yeah,” Charlie said. “Of course, then there was the accident. A bit depressing, really. I quite miss them, sometimes. So, I've heard about you from Hagrid. He said if you came looking for him and he wasn't around, I was to go and fetch him, even if he was in the middle of something really important. You must've made quite an impression on him when you met him.”

“Yeah,” Luke said. “I guess.”

“So, are you getting all the benefit out of Hagrid's advice that you thought you would?”

“Yes sir,” Luke said, though he wasn't sure that research for his inner Luke/Voldemort Venn Diagram counted as advice.

“Ah, good then.”

“Ah, Charlie,” Hagrid said, “Would you mind goin' an' choppin' the wood righ' away? I'd do it, but my arm's been—“

“You don't have to do that, Hagrid,” Luke said. “I think I've bothered you enough.”

“Righ',” Hagrid said. “Well then, you take care, an' if you need to talk again, just remember me.”

“Right. Thank you, sir.”

Luke didn't quite run, but he still had a feeling he was fleeing a madhouse. Most people, most sane people, after having an arm chewed off by a dragon, would not immediately go and seek employment elsewhere, and would almost certainly not think of Hogwarts as the place to go.

Mark was waiting for him on the castle's front steps, which was more than a bit surprising.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” Mark asked.

Luke shrugged. “I dunno. I hope so.”

“And why the sudden interest in Voldemort?” Mark asked.

Luke shook his head. “It's just... I'm trying to make sure Potter doesn't think I'm like him,” Luke lied.

“And I suppose a part of that is that you're going to hang out with me more?”

Luke stared at Mark. “Hang out... what? Mark... were listening to what Hagrid was saying or something?”

“No,” Mark said. “I'm just... he said something about me?”

“Well, yeah. I asked him about Voldemort, and he said that Voldemort wouldn't have ever hung around with you. But that's not why I'm hanging around with you, I'm hanging around with you because I like you.”

“Oh,” Mark looked down at the ground. There was a long pause before he finally looked back up. “Thanks.”

He didn't say anything else, just wandered off to the Hufflepuff commons, as though everything that could be said, had been.

Luke wandered off to the Slytherin common room and found Marissa sitting on a big green couch, reading a book that he'd lent her, but he didn't say anything to her.

\------------------------

“And he had orders to talk to Potter if I came to ask him about Voldemort,” Luke said. “You can't tell me that's not suspicious.”

“There are plenty of possible reasons for that,” Violet said. “Like what if the teachers weren't sure that you were okay?”

Luke speared a chunk of his scrambled eggs with special vigor and shook his head. “You don't get it, Violet. He was told he shouldn't tell me that I was being monitored. He never told me who told him to tell them that I talked to him.”

“I'm sorry, could you say that again, but slower?”

“He didn't tell me who was giving him his orders,” Luke said.

“Didn't you just say that Flitwick told him?” Marissa pointed out from across the table.

“No, Flitwick told him to talk to Flitwick, but he didn't tell me who told him to talk to Potter, and I think it was Potter who told him that. But even if it wasn't Potter, it might still have been Potter who wanted Hagrid to report on me, because Potter obviously has some influence around here.”

“He taught us one class and came to talk to you after the hat incident,” Teddy snapped. He was beginning to turn surly about Luke's insistence that Harry Potter was watching him. “And I think it was perfectly reasonable for him to talk to you about the hat, after all, he's an auror, and he's the one who beat Voldemort in the first place. And the second place, for that matter!”

“But who's to say that what the hat said even has anything to do with Voldemort?” Violet said suddenly. “Unless you want to try to convince me that Voldemort was the only student who was sorted into Slytherin in nineteen-thirty-eight.”

“We've been over this,” Luke said.

“Actually, isn't one of the ghosts from around that time?” Teddy asked.

“Yeah, Moaning Myrtle,” Violet said. “And we're not asking her about this, she'd just say Luke is Voldemort to make us miserable.”

“I doubt that,” Luke said. “Voldemort's the one that killed her.”

All four of his friends stared at him.

“What? You didn't know that? It was when he opened the Chamber of Secrets in forty-three. It's in the back of Reigns of the Dark Lords: An Overview.”

“You've been researching him a bit too much, mate,” Teddy said. “That stuff will turn you funny in the head.”

“There's nothing funny about sociopathy,” Luke said evenly, and took another bite of scrambled eggs.

\----------------------

As Luke walked to Charms class that day, talking with Teddy about which mental illnesses were and were not funny—Teddy held that people thinking they were inanimate objects was hilarious, and Luke kept insisiting that that didn't happen—Luke began to feel that he was being watched. Not in the distant, Harry Potter way that he'd felt beforehand, either.  
The feeling was explained a moment later when someone tapped on Luke's shoulder.

Luke turned around and found Professor Flitwick behind him.

“Mister Restimen,” the diminutive wizard said, “I would appreciate seeing you in my study after your potions class this evening. We have some things to discuss. Professor Leiman will escort there.”

Luke nodded. “Right. Yes sir. Um, Professor Flitwick, sir?”

“Yes, Mister Restimen?”

“Does this have anything to do with—“

“We will discuss that when the time comes, Mister Restimen.”

Flitwick peered at Luke through slitted eyes for a moment, looking contemplative, then turned on his heel and walked away.

“Right,” Luke said.

“Well,” Teddy said. “That was weird. You don't suppose it has anything to do with you talking to Hagrid, do you?”

“More likely,” Marissa said drily behind him, “It's about his being really creepily obsessed with Voldemort.”

“Oh, lay off,” Luke snapped.

Still, the rest of the day seemed to pass very slowly, especially the Charms class, during which Professor Gills watched him like a hawk. Potions, on the other hand, never seemed to pass so quickly. It almost seemed as though Professor Leiman was rushing through his lesson, which, for once, Luke couldn't quite absorb for the sense of dread hanging over the upcoming meeting. With several hours to imagine what it might be about, Luke had managed to work it into the teachers deciding he was dangerous after all, and wondered if they might be about to strip him of his magical power.

The other students filed out of the classroom, Marissa with an apologetic look backwards at Luke, and left Luke alone with the Potions teacher.

It was strange. He didn't look like the sort of man who sat in his office and lovingly polished a deadly weapon.

“Are we ready, then?”

“Yes, sir,” Luke said. Leiman almost seemed shorter than usual today, but that simply couldn't be right—the man wasn't short at all, really.

He stepped over and picked up Luke's Potions book and cauldron and led him out of the classroom. “You won't be needing these, I'll deliver them to your dormitory. You know, I suspect that if I had attended Hogwarts, I would have been a Slytherin, just like you.”

“You do?” Luke asked. “I'd always figured you for a Gryffindor man, if you don't mind my saying.”

Leiman laughed. “I appreciate it very much. I understand that the most prominent Potions instructors have traditionally been either Slytherins or outsiders like myself. I like to promote the idea that I'm different, and besides, playing the role of a Gryffindor type of person keeps me in good form.”

“Sir,” Luke said, “If you don't mind my asking, what did you do before you were a teacher?”

Professor Leiman gave another chuckle, this one lower and more amused than triumphant. “You have some of Tom Riddle's sense for people, you know. That is the key question with me, and the answer is that, if I were to tell you in any detail, I would have to kill you. Suffice it to say that it was dangerous enough to break my leg beyond magical repair, and rewarding enough to keep me in the business for twenty-three years. And I got my start in the United States Army, I can tell you that much.”

“I thought wizards and witches weren't allowed to enter the armed forces,” Luke said.

Leiman grinned. “The US is different, Luke. And it was especially different when I was eighteen. They used to draft wizards into special military units, but after the cold war really got going, that slowly stopped, and now they just... well, they do other things. It started getting worse and worse, and that's why I left the country. It was only rewarding enough to keep me in the business for twenty-three years.”

Luke nodded, and then, after a few moments, he said, “So, why do you use your cane as a wand? Don't you have a wand of your own?”

Professor Leiman laughed a bit louder at that one.

“Oh, you are a clever one. A bit too clever, perhaps, but... well. If you must know, the cane is my wand. Forty inches, mahogony, unicorn tail hair. The whole tail hair. It was built specially after my wand was broken in the same duel that broke my leg. I won that one, but that's another story.”

Luke nodded. Either Leiman was making this up as he went along, or he was the single most interesting person Luke had ever encountered. Actually, if he was creative enough to make it all up, that still made him pretty interesting.

After a few minutes quiet walking, they arrived at the entrance to the Headmaster's Office, and Professor Leiman pursed his lips and sighed. “For the record, Luke, no matter what happens in there, I don't believe for a second that you've gone bad. And no, I don't know what you've been called for. I just know what you've had on your mind. There's no point in having all this training if I don't use it, after all.”

He leaned over to the gargoyle next to the entrance and muttered, “Patronus,” and the gargoyle nodded grimly and moved aside, and the wall opened up. Inside the wall was, as far as Luke could tell, a spiral escalator. It was made of stone, and really, logically, architecturally, structurally, there was no way for it to exist that didn't involve falling down.

Magic is weird.

Luke shrugged and stepped onto the moving staircase, and, not being quite ready to trust his life to a piece of engineering more than a hundred times as old as he was, he ran all the way up.

When he arrived at the top of the stairs, he knocked on the solid-looking wooden door and it opened up for him.

The heads of house were there.

Professor Shelly, decked out in full Hufflepuff mode, was glaring daggers at Gills. Longbottom seemed to be on her side, and Professor Orkney was looking irritable about something.

Professor Flitwick was standing in front of his desk, somehow managing to look impressive.

Hagrid was standing in the corner, trying very hard not to look in Luke's direction.

And Harry Potter was standing next to Hagrid, apparently unaware of the huge man's discomfort.

It was Potter who strode forward and spoke.

“Luke, have a seat,” he said, pulling out his wand—Luke flinched—and conjuring a chair.

Luke sat. The chair, he noticed, was red, and upholstered with red and gold.

Professor Shelly shot a glare at Potter and waved her wand in Luke's general direction. The chair turned green and silver.

“Now Luke,” Harry said. “Do you know why you're here?”

“Well,” Luke said after a moment, “I had assumed that Professor Flitwick was wondering if he I could persuade my mother to part with her recipe for chocolate ship cookies, but I'm beginning to suspect that's not the case.”

“Luke,” Potter said, “This is a serious matter.”

“Mister Potter,” Luke said, “You have already convinced yourself that I am, in fact, controlled by the spirit of Voldemort. I don't see why we have to have a meeting about it.”

“Mister Restimen!” Professor Gills snapped, “You will speak to your betters with respect.”

Potter, however, was laughing. “Tell me, Luke, did the hat offer you Gryffindor? That was a bold thing to say.”

“The hat did not, in fact, offer me Gryffindor,. Sir,” Luke said.

“Ah. Tell me, what exactly did it offer you?”

“Slytherin,” Luke said. “Which I took. I hear rumors that you were offered Slytherin, and the more I see you, sir, the more I can see why.”

Professor Longbottom snorted back a laugh, and Potter shot him a look. “Well you have to admit, Harry, you are acting a bit Slytherin lately.”

“I'm an auror,” Potter said. “It's part of the job. Luke, I am very concerned about your actions recently. Mister Hagrid tells me that you've said things to him which may indicate you've been researching Voldemort's life. Especially his time here at Hogwarts. I don't think I need to tell you why this is... worrying.”

“Didn't it occur to you,” Luke said, “That I simply like to read? That, in browsing through the library, I would have found some books about him? That I would be curious?”

Potter smiled. It looked forced. “Well, yes, of course, but I'm afraid that reading books like that might cause you to... well, they might have a bit more influence on you than they would on most people. Tell me, what do you think of them?”

“I think,” Luke said, trying very hard not to get angry, “That they are about the life of a very angry, very terrible man, who did very many terrible things. I don't, in case you were wondering, think that they are full of wonderful ideas for things to do to my classmates.”

Potter nodded. “Right. The thing, Luke, is that yours is a special case. We don't have anything quite like it on the records, and even Albus Dumbledore didn't predict it.”  
“There is something like it on record,” Luke said. “It happened to you! It was even the same piece of the same man's soul!”

“That was not attached to me at birth,” Potter said. “It happened when I was very young, yes, but not at my birth. That is a significant difference. I was a... well, I was something that you needn't know about, created accidentally by dark magic, and you, young man, are a different sort of thing.”

“I'm not Voldemort!” Luke shouted.

“Good,” Potter said. “And as long as that remains perfectly clear, we shall have no problems.”

“Harry,” Professor Shelly snapped.

“Oh, now what is it, Shelly?” Potter said.

“Don't you give me that tone, Potter. I may not be an auror, but I will not hesitate to protect my students with the full force of my power, both legal and magical.”

Professor Flitwick cleared his throat and spoke up at last. “I think I am forced to agree, Mister Potter. You have been given a great deal of liberty in the matter at hand, but I am afraid that intimidating my students will not stand. This is Hogwarts, Mister Potter, not the Ministry of Magic. If this student were Tom Riddle Himself, in the flesh, I would protect him with no less vigor for it. You will still be allowed to monitor the situation, and should it become clear to you that Mister Restimen is being enveloped by the soul of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, then, and only then, will you be permitted to go on with this line of questioning. Are we clear?”

Potter swallowed, as though he had a few words already in his mouth that needed to go back down. “Yes, sir.”

“Very well then,” Professor Flitwick said. “I believe that it is time for you to leave. You have clearly become agitated, and no wonder. Whatever else he may be, this boy carries with him the soul of your most dire enemy. You should rest tonight. Take the time to clear your head.”

“Yes sir,” Potter said. He stalked out of the room.

Professor Shelly glared at his back the whole way. Professor Gills stood up and left a few moments later, probably off to go and have a private word with Potter. Professor Orkney stood up a few moments later and was gone.

Professor Longbottom knelt down in front of Luke. “He's not usually like that, you know. He's just got it into his head that you might be dangerous, and when he has an idea like that, well, he worries at it like a dog. He's really a nice guy.”

Luke stared at Professor Longbottom. “Sir, if you have to tell me that he's a nice guy, then I really have to tell you that I doubt it. Usually, that's the sort of thing people can tell for themselves.” He couldn't keep the anger out of his voice when he spoke, and he didn't really want to.

Longbottom stood up and walked out of the room. Apparently, having tried was enough. Luke looked around the room. It seemed a lot bigger now that it wasn't so full. “Thanks for trying to help, Professor Shelly,” he said.

She nodded. “I happen to think you've proven yourself to be a good person, Luke,” she said. “And I'm a Hufflepuff. I'd never refuse to have you in my classes just because you might have something unpleasant stuck to the bottom of your soul.”

She stood and left without another word. Professor Flitwick, a moment later, began to chuckle. “Soul. Ah, that was a good one. She should have been a Ravenclaw!” and with that, he retreated out of the room, through a different door that presumably led to his own bedroom.

This left Luke in the extremely awkward position of being alone with Hagrid.

Luke cleared his throat. “Um, Hagrid—“

“Don' say anythin',” Hagrid's choked voice said. “I'm sure you prob'ly hate me now.”

Luke shook his head. “No, I don't. Don't be ridiculous. I mean, I wouldn't have said anything if it was me, but I understand why you did. You really only just met me. You've known Potter for years! He gives interviews about you sometimes. I understand, really.”

“Yeah,” Hagrid said, “But the way he acted, it wasn' right. I mean, yer just a boy, you shouldn' have to deal with that sort o' thing.”

“So was Potter,” Luke said. “And I'd trade that for the worst moment of my life in a heartbeat. You should get back to your hut, sir. I'll go with you, we can have a cup of tea.”

“You'd drink tea with me after I went an' talked to them about you?”

Luke nodded. “Absolutely.”

In the back of his head, he had a feeling that this was a bad idea, but what the heck, maybe he could learn more about Voldemort. He was, after all, really curious.

\----------------------

Hagrid turned out not to have anything else to say about Voldemort, and refused to tell Luke whether Potter was having him watched specifically, though the way he got all smooth and nonchalant after the question came up cemented it pretty well in Luke's head that Potter absolutely was having him followed. Luke also made a private resolution to learn to play poker and then teach it to Hagrid, for the express purpose of earning a few sickles when he was short.

Still, he was beginning to get used to Hagrid, although the man did have a tendency to wax poetic about magical creatures, which he tended to give incongruous names—Luke couldn't help laughing about the dragon named Norbert, of all things—and his job's more unpleasant aspects.

It was Charlie that gave Luke pause. Hagrid had dabbled in dragon-husbandry. Charlie had made a career of it. Luke found it genuinely unsettling to be in the presence of a man who professed to miss something that had taken his left arm off, and so, not long after Charlie's return to the hut, he left, protesting that he was getting tired.

As he closed the door, he thought he heard Hagrid say, “You know, Charlie, I think he migh' be afraid o' you.”

The winter air was crisp and refreshing, and a light flurry of snow was coming down to dust the grounds as the day wore through sunset.

It was like a picture from a postcard, and it made Luke feel happy. He started whistling a tuneless little melody as he walked.

A few minutes later, as Luke approached the castle, he heard a shout. It sounded like Runel's voice. He glanced over towards the lake and saw a bunch of boys having a snowball fight. Considering that Runel was one of them, Luke doubted that he'd be welcome in their games, and he was about to keep walking when he heard Mark's voice shouting, 

“Luke!”

Luke turned on his heel and marched over to where the boys were. As he got closer, the scene resolved from a snowball fight to something a bit less friendly. A pair of larger boys were pumelling a smaller one with snowballs, and, now that Luke was closer he could see, mud. A third, who Luke recognized as Heironymus Runel, was standing guard. In fact, he was facing Luke, waiting for a confrontation.

Luke drew his wand.

“Runel, let him go!”

Runel shouted to his accomplices and they stopped their pounding. Mark cringed and stood up as Luke got to within a few paces of Runel.

“What are you doing, Ronny?” Luke said. He'd heard Runel's mother call him that on the platform at the end of Christmas break, and he had a theory that it would upset Runel. This seemed like as good a time as any to test it.

Runel glared at him and seemed to grit his teeth in annoyance. “You don't get to call me that, Restimen.”

“Why not? Is that just for mummy? Leave Mark alone. He's never done a thing to you.”

“He exists, and he's pathetic,” Runel said. “That means he's a target. He's a Hufflepuff, too. So that's bonus points.”

“You know,” Luke said, “It's because of people like you that so many people don't like Slytherin House.”

“Yeah,” Runel said, “And it's because of little mudbloods like you that I haven't got a dad anymore.”

“Let me guess,” Luke said. “He was a Death Eater, and he was bad at duelling. Maybe he should have chosen a different career.”

That had done it. Runel raised his wand and brought it back to strike, like a snake coiled to lunge after its victim.

Luke snapped through the motions of the charm even as Runel was firing off his attack and snapped, “Rebondi!”

At the same moment, Runel shouted, “Conflagrata!” and a flaming form bounded out of the end of his wand, spread wings, and rushed at Luke's shield.

Luke felt the impact push his wand arm back, and the fiery bird rebounded off the shield and flew back at Runel, knocking him to the ground and lighting his robes on fire. Runel's two minions just sort of stood there stupidly, clearly unsure what to do, and Luke ran up to Runel and snapped a charm to put out the fire, leaving Runel curled up on the ground, apparently unconscious.

Luke sighed. “Runel, you idiot.”

“Oi,” one of the other boys snapped. “What do you think you're—“

“I am not in a very good mood right now,” Luke said, rounding on him, wand raised. “You have just helped to ruin my evening, and you did it by attacking my friend. Shut up, or I will hex you into next week.” He looked around. “Come on, Mark.”

Mark followed him back to the castle. “Wow, Luke, you really showed them. And you didn't even have to jinx anybody to do it.”

“Yeah,” Luke said. “Well, you were in trouble, so I wasn't gonna go and leave you unrescued. You're my friend, after all. Just do me a favor, Mark?”

Mark nodded. “Anything.”

“Stop being such a damsel in distress. I won't be there all the time.”

“I'll try,” Mark said. He smiled. “Thanks, Luke.”

Rather unexpectedly, he hugged Luke, very tightly, and then, as though he'd just realized that this was potentially embarrassing, he ran off. Luke shrugged and headed for the dungeons. If Runel wanted to report what had just happened, that was Runel's business, but Luke doubted that he would. After all, he'd just had his butt kicked by a mudblood while he was picking on another boy. That wasn't the sort of thing a Slytherin reported, especially if they had made the first move in the fight.

Luke wasn't going to the Slytherin common room. He turned left, went straight a few dozen yards, and knocked on ProfessorLeiman's door.

“Come in,” Professor Leiman's voice said.

Luke opened it up and stepped inside, and there was the professor, sitting behind his desk, looking very composed and well-put-together. He gave Luke a critical look, like he was deciding what he thought of this new development, and then he said, “Your things are in your trunk, Luke.”

“Yes, sir, I know that sir. I was just thinking, sir, that I should talk to you.”

“Why?” Professor Leiman asked, and Luke sat down and shook his head.

“I don't know. I'm just... sir, you said something earlier. About Voldemort... like you were comparing me to him... did you ever know him, sir?”

“Know him? No, nobody really knew him, and don't ever let anybody try to tell you otherwise. But I met him once. We had tea together. It was in northern Romania, back before he came back to England. It must have been very shortly before he returned, come to think of it. Anyways, I was there on business, and this charming young man approached me and asked if I was a wizard. Naturally, I told him yes, of course I was, and I asked how he knew. He said his name was Lord Voldemort and asked me if I'd like to sit with him for tea and discuss a business proposal. At the time, Romania was a Soviet country, so of course I thought he was trying to get me to defect, but then he gave me this long speech about blood purity and nobility and what-not, and I realized that, yes, he was trying to get me to defect, but not to the Soviets, to him. Of course, I didn't like what he had to say about muggle-borns, never mind what he said about muggles, and things became rather heated. He set a dragon on the town to try to take revenge. It was a lucky thing that I'd brought a rather sizable rifle with me, or that could have been quite the mess.”

Luke nodded. “Right. Um, sir, what did you think of him?”

“Well, to be honest, I didn't think much of him at all. All that power, and he wasted it scheming when he could have been helping people. He was obsessed with immortality, I can tell you that much, and the way he acted, I could tell he already believed a lot of the things he was saying. That's the mark of a bad propaganda artist, son, he believes what he says.”

Leiman smiled. “Now, you, on the other hand... you're all right. You don't have that to you. Either you haven't got that part of him in you, or you're not affected by what you have of him at all. If you ask me, I think it's the second one. You're too good for me to believe Riddle's soul is whispering in your metaphorical ear all the time.”

Luke smiled. “Thank you, sir. It's good to hear you say that.”

“It's the truth,” Leiman said. “And I'm glad to say it to you. But you should go on, Luke. After all, you don't want everybody to think you're a teacher's pet. I hear tell young Tom Riddle was a teacher's pet, and nobody wants that.”

Luke nodded, stood up, and left, headed, this time, for the Slytherin common room.

\-------------------

“He as much as admitted he was following me!” Luke said. “Or, well, having me followed, anyways.”

Marissa shook her head. “That doesn't mean he's wrong,” she said. A few moments later, she processed the implications of this and added, “I mean, that doesn't mean that it's the   
wrong thing to do. It just isn't necessary. Heck, if you rescue more people the way I hear you saved Mark's butt last night—“

“Why does he have to go to an extra effort though?” Violet asked abruptly. While Luke explained the things that Potter had said (filtered, naturally, so that his friends didn't catch the whole truth), Violet had seemed the most shocked, although Luke suspected that was because Mark wasn't awake yet. “I don't have to prove that I'm a good person.”

“Actually,” Luke said, “In a way, you do. It's just that the standards you're held to aren't the same as what Potter is doing to me. You prove you're good by not, for instance, going out of your way to punch babies. I, on the other hand, have to prove that I'm good by taking no interest in the man they're comparing me to and facing down every bully in Hogwarts.”

“That's not fair,” Violet said. “You haven't had to face down the Hufflepuff bully that makes fun of other kids for being less accepting than he is.”

Luke bit back laughter at that. “I haven't had to face down anybody but Runel and the Nimrod Patrol, but that's hardly cause for celebration. Runel could have really hurt me last night.”

“Well maybe now he won't pick on your friends,” Marissa said.

Luke rolled his eyes. “No, now he won't hurt my friends. He's a bully, Marissa, not a mugger.”

Marissa stared at him. “What on earth is a mugger?”

“Someone that beats you up and takes your money. Which is different from a bully in a number of very important ways, such as the willingness to kill you if they have to.” Another long stare. “It's sort of a... a muggle thing.”

“Muggles have some weird things,” Marissa said.

Their conversation would, at that point, likely have devolved into a long debate about whether muggles or wizards had the weirdest customs, but for a shout from near the entrance to the Great Hall.

“Back off, Runel!”

Luke turned and saw Mark, with his wand drawn on Runel.

“Oh Lord,” Teddy murmured. “He's really going to get it now. You don't draw on another student in the Great Hall, and you especially don't draw on a Slytherin, it's a Bad Idea.” The way he spoke made it clear that Bad Idea was capitalized, as though there was a list somewhere. Knowing Teddy, there might have been.

Luke was out of his seat before he could really figure out if he had a plan. Teddy and Violet followed him, and despite Teddy's earlier misgivings, they both drew out their wands, obviously expecting to have to use them if the teachers didn't show up soon.

Runel was already squaring off against Mark, and Mark looked very small up against the Slytherin, with ten inches of oak aimed squarely at his face. Runel was trained. Mark had only been taught.

Luke tapped Runel's shoulder. “Hey Ronny.”

Runel whirled on the spot and glared at him. “What do you want?”

“I want you to leave my friends alone,” Luke said.

Runel, apparently not grasping the fact that Teddy and Violet were there to participate rather than to spectate, snapped back, “You and what army?”

That was when Teddy and Violet raised their wands.

Luke had to admit that Runel was able to rein in his shocked expression with admirable speed. “Merlin's arse, Restimen. What's this, the League of Inter-House friendship? I suppose you'll be threatening not to be my friend anymore if I don't do what you want?”

“No,” Luke said. “I'll be asking you to leave Mark alone, and if you don't, my friends and I will be hexxing you until your cry for mercy. I do like that League idea though. Sounds like the sort of thing this school needs if we're going to have to deal with idiots like you all the time.”

Runel looked back and forth between Luke, Teddy, Violet, and Mark for a while, then, after making the few short leaps in logic that accompany such a revelation, seemed to decide that four different jinxes to the face wasn't worth it. “Fine, you're not worth my time anyways,” he snapped as he turned and stormed away.

Luke let out a sigh of relief. He hadn't actually been sure that would work. “Are you all right, Mark?” Luke asked.

Mark was turning red. “Yeah. He didn't hurt me at all, he just... he called me a name.”

“What did he call you?” Luke asked. He had a sinking feeling he knew.

“He called me a mudblood,” Mark said.

Luke put another point into the sinking-feelings-aren't-always-right category and said, “Is that all? You'd have thought he'd have called you a... something worse than that, anyways.”

“He doesn't think there is something worse than that,” Teddy pointed out.

Luke shrugged. “Well, anyways, Mark, you really ought to try and shrug things like that off. If you let him get you all riled up like that, it might not be us that saves you next time. The teachers might see what's happening and dock your house points, or worse, Runel might get you alone and just jinx you to pieces.”

\----------------------

“So Hagrid. Did you ever get bullied when you were at school?”

Hagrid sipped at his tea and thought about that for a few moments. “Not to my face,” he said. “An' there wasn' exactly anybody who could figure out a way to threaten me. I mean, in case you haven' noticed, I'm not exactly little. Oh, sure, they figured out they could call me names, eventually, but it wasn' overnight, an' by then I'd got expelled, so I was bein' trained by ol' Ogg, an' he was pretty scary, so nobody wanted ter cross him.”

Luke nodded. “Right.”

“Why do you ask, Luke? Is there someone that's been botherin' you?”

“Not me, except that he's been picking on my friends and that bothers me. I think he's afraid to pick on me ever since I hit him in the face after Herbology.”

“Oh. Heironymus Runel. Well, yeah, I can see why that's a bit of a problem fer you. What's he done?”

“Mostly,” Luke said, “He's been picking on Mark. I mean, he obviously doesn't like Marissa, either, and Teddy and Violet are both on his list too, but he really goes after Mark. Sometimes I just want to wring his neck, the things he says. I finally managed to help Mark stop getting mad at being called a mudblood the other day, and now Runel's just moving on to other insults. Of course, the first try was more funny than mean. He tried calling Mark a girl, and that didn't work at all, but I'm worried that Runel is going to come across the insult that works eventually.”

Hagrid shrugged. “What's the worst that could happen then?”

Luke shook his head. “Mark could try to start a fight and get really hurt, Hagrid. He's not very good at magic, he's not confident, but when he gets angry enough he still tries to start fights. Usually with his fists.”

“That barely works if yer a half-giant,” Hagrid said. “Haven' you told him he can' do that?”

“Well, yeah,” Luke said. “Of course I have, but that doesn't mean he'll take my advice. You haven't met Mark. He's... he's strange. I think he's got some kind of a mental problem, something that muggles have some kind of long name and a million and one medicines for, but wizards just think means you're deep, or shy, or eccentric.”

Hagrid laughed. “Muggles make things a little too complicated sometimes, Luke. I thought you woulda noticed that. Maybe yer friend is just a little strange, and sort o' eccentric.”

“Maybe,” Luke said, “But I think it's more likely that a muggle doctor could help him a lot.”

Hagrid shrugged. “Maybe, but you prob'ly aren' the one to tell him that.” He looked out the window. “Look's like Charlie's gettin' back with the thestrals. I ought ter go an' help him out. You know, if you want ter meet the thestrals, I'd be happy ter let you take a look.”

Luke shook his head. “No, thanks. I'll learn about them when I take your class in a couple of years.”

“All righ'. Prob'ly fer the best, anyway. Looks like the one in the middle hurt his wing pretty bad.”

Luke peered out the window and wished he hadn't. Charlie was leading three skeletal, winged horses across the grounds to Hagrid's hut. The one in the middle was, in fact, holding his wing a little crookedly. Luke would have been more inclined towards sympathy if the creature hadn't also been terrifying on a number of levels.

Luke hurried back to the castle after letting himself out of Hagrid's hut.

Early February was not being kind to Hogwarts, and the grounds were muddy, so that Luke slipped a few times and almost fell, but something about the thestrals made him deeply uncomfortable. They reminded him of his father, of watching him die. It was probably because the thestrals themselves looked like they were in a fairly advanced state of death.

He barely took the time to knock the rather large buildup of mud off his shoes when he rushed back into the castle, and was therefore caught off guard by Professor Gills.

“Ah, Mister Restimen. Been off visiting Hagrid, I see.”

Luke let out a startled cry and turned to see the Charms professor bearing down on him, wrapped in green and silver and looking downright ominous.

“Y-yes sir. I'm sorry sir, you startled me.”

Gills smiled as though this had been nothing more or less than what he wanted. “You know, young man, I've been meaning to have a little chat with you for a while, now. I've had the chance to speak with almost all of my first years this year, except for you. You haven't been avoiding me, have you?”

“No,” Luke said. _At least not actively._

“Ah, excellent. Tell me, Mister Restimen, how are you finding Hogwarts so far?”

“It's quite nice,” Luke said.

“Good, good. Come with me, we can speak some more in my office.” And he led Luke through the entrance hall to the staircase, and off to the second floor, into a little office near the charms classroom.

The space was dominated by a number of portraits. A tall, sallow, greasy man with limp black hair, a frame empty of occupant, with only a luxious-looking green and silver chair, a very fat man in a tweed coat, and the instantly recognizable form of Salazar Slytherin. Gills sat down in his chair behind his desk and smiled. “And how are you finding Slytherin house, Luke?”

“It seems to be mostly full of bigots, sir,” Luke said before he could stop himself.

Gills quirked an eyebrow ceilingward. “Bigots, Mister Restimen?”

Luke took a deep breath. In for a penny, in for a pound. “Not all of them, but most of my housemates seem to think that the best word in the world is 'mudblood,' simply because it means the same thing as 'target.'”

“Well, Luke, that's quite a serious thing to say. I know Slytherin house has had its problems with that issue in the past, but it's not exactly promoted by our values.”

“Well, it doesn't matter if it's something we support or not, it's happening.”

Professor Gills shook his head. “Slytherin house has improved a lot since the times of Voldemort, Luke.”

Luke nodded. “Right. And what was it like then? What was it like ten years ago, thirty years ago, seventy years ago?”

Gills smiled. “Seventy years ago was when Voldemort himself was at Hogwarts, you know. It was a very different time. It was before the Muggle Protection Act of nineteen-sixty-three, which was, of course, one of the best decisions the Ministry of Magic ever made. Back then, it wasn't just Slytherin that was filled with hate. It was everybody.”

Luke rolled his eyes. “Everybody, Professor Gills? If it was everybody, then where did Hagrid come from? What about Albus Dumbledore? Professor Leiman was alive then. Did they hate muggles?”

“Well, of course not,” Professor Gills said. “I mean to say that hatred was the rule, and now it is very much the exception, and I am very proud to say that this is so even in Slytherin.”

“But it's not.”

Gills shook his head. “Young man, I am afraid that you are mistaken. It mostly certainly is the exception. Hatred for the muggles and those of an impure blood status is becoming a thing of the past.”

“I got called a mudblood three times this morning,” Luke pointed out.

“I'm sure there was no malice in it.”

Luke shook his head. There was obviously no point in arguing with this man. He utterly refused to be disappointed in Slytherin house. “Whatever the case may be, sir, I don't think we're here to argue about whether or not Slytherin house is redeemed from its past.”

“Quite right, Luke,” Gills said. “Tell me about yourself.”

Luke shrugged. “I don't know, really. I'm eleven. I have friends from all four houses. I live with my mum in Stoughton. I'm a Taurus.”

Professor Gills nodded. “You were raised by muggles? How do you know your astrological sign?”

“Muggles do astrology, too. It's not exactly the most accurate thing in the world.”

Gills shrugged. “Well. I suppose one really does learn something new each day. What do you, personally, think of the muggles?”

“Sir,” Luke said, “I'm beginning to feel like you're questioning me about these things for a reason.”

“Oh, no, Luke, I'm terribly sorry. I'm not making you uncomfortable, am I?”

“A little bit, sir,” Luke said. “I'm afraid I'm more used to the muggle public schools. Teachers there have more students, so they don't meet with them all to get to know them”

“Oh dear,” Professor Gills said. “I'm terribly sorry. If you'd like to return to your common room, please, feel free.”

Luke nodded and got up. He didn't—quite—flee, but it certainly felt like he was.

The next day, Luke awoke to find a commotion in the common room. Most of the students were gathered around the notice board, on which a large paper was displaying an animated sketch of two robed figures duelling. Luke elbowed his way into the crowd of students and read off the paper

DUELLING CLUB!

After seventeen years without one,  
Hogwarts will again have a  
duelling club. All students are  
invited to attend the first meeting  
in the Great Hall at 8:00 PM,  
Wednesday, February 10.  
The club will be administrated by  
Professor Shelly J. Leiman with help  
from Professor James H. Leiman.

Bring your wands, your brains, and  
your friends!

Luke grinned. He knew what he'd be doing Wednesday night.


	4. Your Efforts at Clandestine Surveillance

“So what do you think it's going to be like?” Teddy asked as he and Luke headed down to the meeting.

Marissa had dismissed the club as “A needless exhibition of violence,” and Mark was convinced that he'd be about as good at duelling as your average damp sock, but Violet and Teddy were both eager to try it out.

Luke wagged a finger in Teddy's face. “Ah, Teddy, the first rule of Duel Club is you do not talk about Duel Club.”

Teddy blinked. “What?”

Violet was giggling behind Luke. She gave him a high five as they reached the entrance hall. The doors to the Great Hall were wide open, and it was packed. Athletic mats in garish green colors were lined up on the floor. The students inside were divided up mostly by age. Almost the entire first year had turned out, although Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw were a lot less prominent than Gryffindor, which seemed to be all there, and Slytherin, which was nearly as complete. Second years were almost as numerous, and third years the same, but after that, the numbers were smaller.

Luke, Teddy, and Violet stepped inside and tried to hold a conversation for about five more seconds before it occurred to them that it was simply too loud to get anywhere without almost screaming.

They milled about with the other students for a while as stragglers came in a few at a time, and then eight PM rolled around and there was a blast of thunder.

Everyone instinctively looked up at the ceiling, and in the silence, Professor Shelly's voice echoed through the Great Hall. “Hello, students,” she said, conjuring a little stage out of nowhere and stepping up onto it. Professor Leiman was right behind her, leaning on his cane. They were both flanked by a pair of large black cats that Luke recognized as the Pono that she had shown them during their first Defense lesson. Professor Shelly herself was decked out, not in formal dress robes as one might almost expect of a duelling witch, but in well-tailored blue jeans and a t-shirt with the logo of a wizarding band on it. Professor Leiman was wearing his customary suit.

“Today,” Professor Shelly said, “I'm pleased to greet Hogwarts' first Duelling Club in seventeen years, and its first serious one in fifty-seven years. I could lecture you on the history of this rather sporadic tradition at Hogwarts, but I'm here to teach you to duel, not to doze. There are two ways we can go about this. We could start duelling right away, or Professor Leiman and I could treat you to an exhibition to run you through the process. I know I'd rather start duelling right away, but then, that may be because I know that Professor Leiman is impossible to beat.” There was laughter at that, and Professor Shelly waited for it to die down before she continued, “However, this club is for the students, not the teachers, and I expect that some of you will need to learn how a formal duel works. So, really, it's not up to me.”

With that, she waved her wand and the stage expanded. Professor Leiman stepped up and smiled. Something about the way his limp almost vanished as he reached the floor of the stage seemed to signal that he wasn't a man to be trifled with. With a nod of his head, he dismissed his Pono and they vanished. Professor Shelly did the same.

“Now, the first thing to remember is that a formal duel is not the same thing as combat. A formal duel is organized, and your opponent is trying to get you to concede or to knock you out. You have a limited area that you can move in, and leaving it constitutes defeat. It is a sport. As such, you begin by bowing to your opponent.”

She bowed to Professor Leiman. He bowed in return.

“There is no pre-approved stance, but there are styles, and you'll want to be consistent. I like to begin with my hands at my side, wand pointing to the ground. Professor Leiman doesn't have a regular wand, and uses a cane instead. This is allowed under the nineteen-eighty-three revision of the rules which states that duelists may use their choice of magical implements, but bans the use of potions. Now, for this duel, all of our incantations will be said aloud so that you can tell when we are using a spell. This doesn't mean that our using an incantation is permission for you to use it. Some of the spells we will use are very difficult to master, and you will learn them in due time if you stay with the club. Probably. Now, let's begin.”

She straightened up and stepped forward, shouting “Amiki!”

A second blast of thunder roared across the Great Hall. It was so intense and focused that Luke could track its progress across the room as it headed for the Potions teacher. It seemed that Professor Leiman wasn't going to defend himself at all until, rather abruptly, he lifted his cane and snapped “Rebondi!”

Professor Shelly tossed up a shield spell to dispell her own roaring blast of sound, then immediately flew into a rushing, whirling, dancing motion. “Oconomo pono esiki manaasa cempati!” she screeched, and a pair of Pono stepped out of thin air and onto the stage, rushing at Professor Leiman.

He jabbed his cane at the rushing cats and snapped “Expecto patronum!” A shining silvery lion rushed out of the end of the cane and batted one of the Pono aside. The other one rushed the professor, and he sidestepped it and clocked it on the back of the head with his cane, snapping “Stupefy,” as he did. There was a flash of red light and the cat collapsed and skidded down the stage, fading out of existence as it slid. Leiman continued his sidestepping motion, pivoting on his left leg and jabbing his cane at his daughter-in-law. “Inflictus,” he snapped.

Professor Shelly yelped in pain and her right leg collapsed under her, but she rolled with the movement, bringing her wand up and snapping “Levicorpus!”

At almost the exact same instant, Leiman snapped “Rebondi!” and Professor Shelly was abruptly lifted into the air by her ankle as her Pono faded completely.

Leiman immediately snapped “Liberacorpus,” and Professor Shelly was dropped onto the stage, headfirst.

Professor Leiman walked over to her very calmly—though not slowly—and aimed the end of his cane directly at her face.

Professor Shelly groaned. “That was a good one. I didn't think that was possible.”

Professor Leiman laughed. “Neither did Ivan Rostosvki. Do you concede?”

“Yes, I suppose so,” Professor Shelly said.

He smiled and helped her up. It occurred to Luke that Professor Leiman had barely moved during the duel, and when he had, it had been only enough to do what he had to do.  
Professor Shelly waved her wand and the stage shrank to fit just her and Professor Leiman. “Well,” she said. “Now that we know what a duel looks like, why don't we pair off. First, second, third, and fourth years, only with your own years. Fifth year and above, you may pair with each other how you see fit. If you have some kind of a reason to dislike someone, don't pair up with them, this is duelling club, not the WWE.”

Violet grabbed Luke's hand and pulled him close to her.

“Aww,” Teddy said. “Come on, I was gonna do that.”

“You can have him next time,” Violet said.

Luke shook his head. “Excuse, me, what? Don't I get a choice in this?”

“No,” Violet said, dragging him over near one of the mats.

The professors lined up their students in neat rows Professor Leiman conjured a diagram of the duelling floor's space while Professor Shelly explained what all the lines were, and all about disarming rules, and then the duels started.

Luke bowed to Violet, and they all waited for the signal to begin. As soon as Professor Shelly's whistle sounded, Violet started moving.

She snapped out something that sounded slavic and sent a rush of purple energy at Luke. He ducked and the spell whizzed over his head. He fired back with a stunning hex, and Violet blocked it with a shield charm. They went back and forth like that for about a minute before Violet to get off a good rebondi and the next thing Luke knew, he was waking up with Violet's wand tapping his head.

Luke had a feeling this was going to be fun.

By the time the meeting was over, Luke was convinced that he knew exactly what sort of a thing he'd like to do for a career. He'd also seen Professor Leiman helping the older students and ran to catch up with him at the end of the meeting.

“Professor Leiman!”

The suited man turned around, smiling. “Hello, Luke! You did quite well tonight, I noticed. Very good use of shield charms.”

Luke shook his head. “I lost more than I won.”

“So did I, in my first year,” Professor Leiman said. “Of course, I started my education when I was nine, and I only showed signs of magic when I was eight. You know, they thought I was going to turn out a squib for a long time.”

Luke grinned. “Okay, sure, but I was nothing like you. You were really good up there on the stage!”

“Oh, that?” Leiman said. “What makes you say that I was good? Most of the other students I talked to thought that was a very close contest.”

Luke shook his head. “You barely moved, and when you did, it was only because you had to.”

“Hm. You know, Luke, you have a good eye for duelling. Try not to let that determine your career, all right?”

Luke nodded. “Yes sir. Why do you say I have a good eye for duelling?”

Leiman laughed. “The best duelists don't bother with show. Professor Flitwick, for example. I've never had the pleasure of facing him, he was a bit before my time, but I've heard that he took down Linda Lightspell, one of the foremost duelling champions of her day, without casting a single offensive spell.”

“Really?”

Professor Leiman nodded. “Absolutely. I had hoped he would be willing to help with the club a little more, but he is, after all, a very busy man. You'd better get off to bed, though. It's getting late.”

Luke nodded and ran off, his head full of thoughts about duelling championships.

\-------------------

The week rolled by slowly, and with much irritation. Runel was being insistent about teasing Mark, and even with Luke and his League (the name had stuck), keeping watch, things almost got out of control a couple of times. Luke wanted, at times, to curse Runel until the boy's eyes bled, but of course, that would be bad. And to make matters worse, Professor Shelly seemed to be of the opinion that Valentine's ought to be celebrated at Hogwarts, and although Professor Longbottom intimated that she wasn't being nearly as bad about it as certain other teachers had, the fact remained that her classroom was festooned in pink paper hearts on strings, and this had reminded most of the girls in the school that, in fact, there were boys in the school, which, in turn led to a lot of giggling.

Thankfully, Violet seemed to be immune to this, possibly because the professor was her mother and therefore anything that she did that made the whole school talk (except for duelling club, which everyone agreed was a wonderful idea) was embarrassing.

Marissa, on the other hand...

Luke woke up on Sunday morning with a valentine on the nightstand next to him. It was a pink paper heart spellotaped to a chocolate frog, but that was more than enough to qualify. The good thing about this was that he got a chocolate frog, and he'd been collecting the cards (and giving the frogs themselves to Mark). The bad thing was that it had a pink paper heart spellotaped to it, and it was from a girl, and one with whom Luke already spent a lot of his time, and the instant the other boys saw it, he began to be teased. Luke sighed and opened the box. The frog leapt out and Luke stunned it in mid jump. It fell to the floor with a dull thud.

Luke went down to the common room feeling irritable and found that Marissa was already there, cleaned up and looking very chipper. This did not improve his mood any.  
“Hi Luke!” she said, and he sighed.

“Hi Marissa.”

“Did you get the frog?”

“Yeah. Uh, thanks.” It took an effort to not add “I guess” to the end of the sentence.

She grinned, blissfully unaware of the burning shame rising up the back of Luke's neck and threatening to force him to blush.

He mumbled something about needing to go wash up and came back twenty minutes later showered and presentable. She was still there.

Luke sighed. “Shall we?”

She grinned. “Sure.”

Something about that smile filled Luke with a sort of primal terror, and sure enough, as Marissa stood up, she kissed him on the cheek before walking away. She stopped to look back at the effect her gesture had had. Luke heaved a sigh and headed out the door of the common room, staunchly refusing to hold hands with her.

They arrived at the Great Hall to find that almost the entire first year had either separated itself by gender—one table in particular was all boys on one side, all girls on the other—or else into pairs in which the boy looked rather uncomfortable and kept edging closer to the refuge of other boys. One table seemed to be immune to this effect. Teddy, Violet, and Mark all sat together at the usual table. Teddy's hair was the precise color of pea soup today. Violet seemed to be bright red.

Luke rushed for the safety of the table. He considered screaming and running, but figured that a determined, fast-paced walk was more likely to work. He sat down next to Mark and, before anyone could say anything at all, he said “Hey Mark, how's it going?”

Mark looked up at him, glanced at Marissa sitting down next to him, turned a rather interesting puce color, and looked back down at his plate.

They all ate very fast, without much talking, except for Teddy, who kept mumbling something about nerves. Once breakfast was (thankfully, finally, praise-be-to-god) over, they fled the Great Hall. Marissa tried to get Luke to stay seated, grabbing his hand. He gripped and pulled her out of her seat, dragging her halfway to the door before she finally gave up and came along willingly.

“I cannot believe this!” Teddy shouted when they finally reached the safety of a relatively anonymous corridor on the fifth floor with a large window they could sit by. “I wake up, and she's already in the common room, with this stupid, bright pink paper heart and a box of chocolates, waiting for me like a... like a... like a trap-door spider or something!”

“Who?” Mark asked.

“Patil!” Teddy shouted. “Pam Patil! Just... waiting for me, like... like...”

“A crocodile in a muddy river,” Luke suggested.

“Yes, like one of those!” Teddy's hair had actually managed to turn a more unpleasant color than pea soup as he vented his rage.

“She's not that bad,” Mark said, blushing a bit. “I think she's sort of pretty.”

“I'm eleven!” Teddy shouted. “I don't care if she's pretty, I don't want her pushing chocolates on me!”

Violet giggled. “You didn't have to jinx her, though.”

“You jinxed her?” Luke said.

“Absolutely I jinxed her! She was giving me chocolate!”

“How dare she,” Marissa said drily.

Luke snorted back a laugh and tried to pretend he had something caught in his nose. He doubted the others believed it.

“Oh, Mark,” Luke said. “That reminds me.”

He pulled the chocolate frog from that morning, now disenchanted, out of his pocket and tossed it to Mark. Mark caught it and grinned. “Thanks.”

“You too?” Teddy said. “Why didn't you jinx her?”

Luke shook his head. “I never got the chance. I woke up and... uh... someone... had left it on my nightstand.”

“No name?” Teddy said.

Luke turned red.

“Oh go on, tell them, they'll find out eventually anyway,” Marissa said. She seemed a little peeved that Luke had just given away her gift to Mark.

“You tell them,” Luke said. “I have to pee.” He turned on his heel and walked away, headed for the nearest bathroom and leaving Marissa behind, rather fantastically red in the face.

That, Luke thought on the way back from the bathroom, had been a rather effective tactic. Certainly Marissa hadn't been expecting it, and he felt very much better for having gotten his shots in.

He rounded the corner to where his friends were sitting and his spirits immediately fell.

There was a preponderance of Slytherin robes gathered around the window, and wands were out.

Hieronymus Runel, of course, was in the middle of the group. Marissa stood across from him, wand out and pointed at his chest, but the fight was obviously over. Runel snapped something he couldn't hear and a lash of yellow light whipped out of his wand and knocked Marissa to the floor. Luke turned and ran to get a teacher, and found himself face to face with another boy.

Well, okay, more face to chest. The other boy was a second-year, and between him, Runel, and the other four boys, Luke was fairly sure he had no chance of escaping a trip to the infirmary.

“Found Restimen,” the second year cried, turning Luke roughly around by the shoulders.

Runel turned. There was a predatory grin on his face, like he was winning a game, instead of hurting people. Luke felt a cold little trickle of rage starting in the back of his head. He clamped down on it. This was no time to get angry and stupid.

“Hello, Luke,” Runel said.

“Ronny,” Luke replied.

Runel sneered. He had a very good face for sneering. “Looks like the League of Interhouse Friendship isn't so tough after all.” The cold trickle of rage flowed a little faster. “I was surprised when I saw little Marky with a chocolate frog. I thought nobody loved him. Of course, I told him that, and he just sort of laughed at me. You have him trained pretty well, Restimen. But then, I called him a squib, and do you know what the idiot tried to do?

“The little halfwit tried to hit me. So of course, I hurt him. Well, your other friends didn't like that, so they tried to help, but... well, you and your cronies aren't the only ones with friends. The little blood traitor girl, though... she stood up to me. So I hurt her extra hard.”

He drew up closer to Luke, which was a mistake, because at that precise moment, Luke lost control of the little flow of rage. He felt his hand come up, almost as though someone else was controlling him. It was his left hand, he thought distantly, because he was going to be using magic later and he intended to hit Runel so hard that he would injure his own hand. The fist flew up and slammed into Runel's eye, almost of its own volition, and Luke's right hand was already on his wand, flying out of his robe, his mouth screaming “Repullu!” and the other boys flying away from him. Runel collapsed backwards to the ground, landing hard on his backside, and then swung his own wand up and snapped off a stunning hex. Luke cast a shield, not even bothering to speak the words of the spell, and the hex bounced off and slammed into another one of the Slytherins. A couple more stunning hexes were headed for him, but Luke simply didn't care. With a twisting whirl, and a hand motion he could never recall afterwards, he flung his wand out and caught one of the hexes on the tip, then spun in place and redirected it at a second boy, dodging another pair of spells. Runel was battering uselessly at Luke's shield, and Luke ignored it, dispatched the other three Slytherins with a contempt that shocked even a part of himself, then turned and glared at Runel. When he spoke, his voice felt odd, different, as though he hadn't spoken in days.

“Get up.” Runel got to his feet and stared at Luke. The rage seemed stronger, rather than weaker, without the other boys to distract him. “We're going to have a duel, you and I,” Luke heard himself say. “And you are going to lose.” His wand came up, an extension of his rage, and he commanded, “Bow.”

The wand dipped, and Runel, looking extremely surprised, bowed as commanded.

Luke sketched a bow himself, and then snapped his wand up and said, “You've hurt my friends, Hieronymus. I'm going to make you hurt for that. I'm going to make you hurt quite a lot.”

Runel whipped his wand at Luke and shouted a spell. Luke's wand moved almost faster than Luke could track and a shield charm batted the spell aside.

“Incarcerous!” Luke's voice shouted, and ropes spat from the end of his wand and wrapped around Runel, dragging him to the floor.

“Luke!” Marissa's voice sounded ragged, and Luke thought, though through the dissociation, he would never be sure, that if she hadn't sounded so pained, it wouldn't have happened.

Whatever the reason, though, it was as though Luke's rage simply took over his body. The Rage stepped up to Runel's prone form, and said, very coldly, “Crucio.”

Runel let out a screech of agony, and someone behind Luke shouted “Stupefy!” and everything went black.

\----------------

“For the last time, Potter, I don't know! The boy is unconscious, and I thought it best to keep him that way. He also has a broken hand, I'll thank you to note, and if you so much as speak to him before I have given you permission to do so, I will personally throw you out of the window, whether Filius agrees with it or not!”

“Professor Leiman?” Luke said.

“Luke!” Professor Leiman's face floated into view. “What happened?”

“I'm not entirely sure,” Luke said. “Sir, my hand hurts.”

Leiman nodded. “I don't doubt that it does. Hold still, Luke.”

Luke swallowed. “Yes sir.” He had a feeling he knew what was coming, and indeed, Leiman was staring into his eyes.

“Legilimens.”

Luke watched from behind his eyes as his rage grew out of control, watched his wand come up to force pain into Runel's body...

Runel bowed to Luke...

“...So I hurt her extra hard,” Runel said, and then he came close, he came within striking distance, and Luke hit him, hard, and then he watched as his body began to move, his wand came up...

Professor Leiman looked very concerned. He looked away from Luke's eyes.

“Well, James,” the voice of Minerva McGonagall said expectantly. “What is the verdict?”

Luke turned to look for her, but instead he saw Harry Potter, watching hawklike from under a dark hood.

“I had my suspicions the moment he used the cruciatus curse on the Runel boy. No first year student, particularly a muggle-born, should know that spell, and no first year should have the power to cast it. I believe that he became so angry that whatever blocks were keeping the fragment of Riddle's soul in place slipped. Voldemort... or some part of him, anyway, was able to take over the boy's body for about two minutes, perhaps a little more.”

“Then he is dangerous,” Potter exclaimed. “I've told you—“

“Potter, quiet! You behave like a spoiled child sometimes, and it's beginning to get on my last nerve,” Professor Leiman snapped. A couple of people that Luke couldn't see gasped audibly at that. “Just listen to me. There's something I don't understand. When Riddle took over, he didn't set off to re-establish his Death Eaters. He continued the fight, stunning instead of killing, even though he could easily have killed. He didn't act like a murderer, he acted like a boy defending his friends, fighting off bullies. And he didn't use the cruciatus curse until he heard one of those friends suffering.”

“But he used the cruciatus curse, James,” Potter said. “An unforgivable curse, used on a child in the halls of Hogwarts. Do you mean to tell me you want to turn a blind eye to that? He's dangerous.”

Potter turned on his heel and stormed out of the room.

Professor Leiman sighed. “You might as well sit up, Luke, if you feel ready.”

Luke grunted and sat up. He looked around. He was in the infirmary, which seemed to have been emptied of other students. The heads of house were in the room, along with Professor Flitwick.

“How do you feel, Luke?” Professor Shelly asked.

Luke shook his head. “I feel like I've been hit by a truck,” he said. “And believe me, I know what that feels like. Can anything be done about my hand? It really hurts.”

“You've already been given a dose of healing potion,” Professor Leiman said. “It should be better in few hours. I'd tell you that you can get to your classes if you feel up to it, but I think Professor Flitwick might object.”

“But it's Sunday,” Luke said.

Leiman shook his head. “I'm afraid that stunning spell I hit you with was... rather powerful. It's Monday. Luke, do you remember what happened?”

“Sort of,” Luke said. “It felt like... like I was watching it. Was that because it was Voldemort doing it?”

“Yes, I imagine so,” Professor Leiman said.

There was an awkward pause as the gravity of the situation sank in.

Professor Gills cleared his throat. “Well,” he said. “If that's all, I really ought to go and prepare for my classes today.”

The head of Slytherin house stood up and started to amble towards the door, but was brought up short when it burst open and the massive form of Hagrid rushed in, holding something in his arms.

“Professor Flitwick!” he shouted. “We've got a problem!” Hagrid rushed over to one of the infirmary beds and dumped the bundle in his arms onto it. It looked human.

“Hagrid,” Flitwick said, “Is that Potter?”

“Yes sir,” Hagrid said. “I had ter stun 'im, y'see! He rushed inter the Great Hall while all the students was eatin' their breakfast, an' he stood up an' told 'em... He told 'em everything, sir. All abou' what happened with Luke and the Runel boy, an' what we know about Luke, how he's got You-Know-Who in his head, an' I was so surprised I couldn' think abou' anythin' fer a little while, but then I came back to my senses an' I stunned him, sir!”

Luke stared at Hagrid.

“Hagrid,” Professor Leiman said, “Did you say anything to the students?”

“I told 'em ter stay in the Great Hall, sir,” Hagrid said.

Professor Leiman stood up, nodding sharply. “I'll go and see if I can keep this from getting too bad,” he said. “But that was Harry Potter that just told them that. I doubt I can do anything to keep them from believing this short of obliviating them.”

“Which you are not permitted to do,” Flitwick said. “Nor are you permitted to confund them. The damage is done, James. Do not make it worse.”

Professor Leiman nodded and left the infirmary. McGonagall followed behind him a few moments later.

“Does anyone want to tell me what the cruciatus curse is?” Luke asked after a few moments.

Professor Shelly sighed. “It's a curse that's used to inflict pain. Terrible pain. Worse than inflictus by far. It can drive people insane.”

Luke shook his head. “And I used that on Runel?”

She nodded.

“I think I'm going to be sick,” Luke said as a vision of Runel twisting under his wand crossed through his mind.

Professor Shelly grabbed a trash can and rushed over to him. When Luke was finished retching, she took the can away and shook her head. “If you need anything, Luke, just talk to me. I have to go and prepare for my classes on the off chance that there are any today. With what Potter's just done, I'm beginning to have my doubts.”

The other teachers filed out, some of them passing small words of comfort to Luke as they left, until Luke was alone with Professor Flitwick.

“Sir,” Luke said, “Am I going to be expelled?”

The professor didn't have an answer for him.

\----------------------

The rest of the day passed slowly, and with a dreary kind of inevitability. Hagrid visited to tell Luke that classes were cancelled on account of the students being in a kind of general panic over the revelation of his secret, but he seemed uncertain about what else to say, and left before too long, giving Luke a rock-hard scone before he went. Professor Leiman showed up, as well, around noon, and took Luke's wand.

“It's by the order of the Ministry of Magic,” he said. “I'm terribly sorry, Luke... it has to be snapped in half.”

He offered to let Luke do it himself. Luke shook his head.

A number of concerned parents arrived throughout the day to take their children home, as though Luke had declared himself the Dark Lord Reborn and escaped to terrorize the countryside instead of sitting in the infirmary with no wand and only teachers to visit.

Towards the end of the day, he heard a scream outside of the door to the infirmary and ran to the windowed door.

Mark was outside, being dragged forcibly through the entrance hall by a plump witch in a striped robe.

“No! I'm not leaving, he's my friend!” Mark shrieked at her, so loud that the sound hurt Luke's ears.

The witch turned and said something to Mark, and Mark shook his head. “He's my friend!” He was no longer shrieking, but he was certainly still very upset. “He gives me his chocolate frogs, he helps me with my homework! He's not some kind of evil supervillain, he's my friend!”

Luke felt himself tearing up. He tried the door. It opened, and he stepped out of the infirmary, staring down at the floor, unable and unwilling to meet anyone's eyes.

“Missus Jonson?”

The scene in the hall froze at his voice.

“Yes? Do I know you?”

Luke shook his head. “I just... I'm sorry,” he said. He glanced up at Mark for just a second. “You should go with your mum, Mark. I think she's right.”

“Shut up, Luke,” Mark said.

Missus Jonson let out a little scream and backed away from Luke, dragging her son forcefully with her. “Is that him?”

“Yes, it's him, mum,” Mark said, “And he's not going to hurt you, or me, or anyone. Luke, go back to the infirmary, Leiman must've stunned you harder than you thought if you think she's right.”

And with that, Mark broke and ran for the stairs.

“Ah... Mark Jonson, get back here!” his mother shouted, taking off after him.

“Luke! What are you doing out the infirmary?”

Luke jumped at the sound of Madam Pomfrey, the school healer, scolding him. She grabbed him by the arm and dragged him back into the infirmary. “I swear, you are worse than Potter! Up and pacing when you should be down and healing your hand, wandering out of the infirmary, it will be a wonder if you make it past thirty, young man.”

Luke didn't get any more visitors that day.

\-------------------------

The next morning, Luke awoke to find a single bag of Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans on the table next to him. It was sitting on top of a slip of yellow paper, which he picked up and stared at for a second.

Luke—  
I haven't got much time, so I'll have to be brief.  
Mum thinks you've gone off your rocker  
and are bound to start killing off students any  
minute. I think she's crazy, but she's trying to pull me  
out of school to protect me. It's crazy, I know.  
I keep telling her you're my friend, but  
she just says she knows better than me.  
It looks like I won't get to say goodbye in  
person—or ever talk to you again, the way she's  
talking—so goodbye. I'm really proud to be  
your friend.

—Mark

Luke flipped the note over, hoping that perhaps Mark had been able to convince his mum to not take him home, but the other side was blank.

There was the sound of a door creaking open, and Luke looked up to see a figure walking into the infirmary, a first year student by the look of things. “Mark?” Luke said hopefully.

“No,” Runel said.

Luke almost jumped up and attacked the other boy, but the anger was fleeting and halfhearted.

“I had to stupefy the nurse to get in here,” Runel said. “And the door was really well sealed, but I'm here now.” He knelt on the floor in front of Luke's bed. “What do you want me to do, My Lord?”

Luke stared at him. “What?”

“I'm here seeking the advice of the Dark Lord,” Runel said. “If I had only known, I would never have done anything to give offense.”

Luke shook his head. This was too surreal. “Hieronymus... get up off the floor, you look like an idiot. And you can tell anyone else who thinks they're going to play Death Eater that the club's disbanded. The president is gone, he took his ball and left. There's no Dark Lord, okay. There's just Luke Restimen, and he doesn't want minions, he wants to have a quiet life away from any stupid dark rituals or terrible secrets or unforgivable curses. I'm sorry I hurt you, Hieronymus. I really, really am.”

Runel stood up and shook his head. “But you were going to come back! You were going to get the Death Eaters out of prison, you were going to take over!”

“I'm going,” Luke said, “To get breakfast. Go and revive Madam Pomfrey, or I shall have to get Professor Leiman.”

Runel ran off, looking utterly devastated.

Suddenly, it dawned on Luke.

“Runel!”

He stopped. “What?”

“Your parents... is one of them in Azkaban?”

Runel nodded. “Yes, My Lord. My father served you in the second war, but he was captured in the battle that happened here.”

“I'm sorry, Hieronymus,” Luke said. “I'm really sorry. I wish I could help you. I really do.”

Runel shook his head, turned, and fled the room. He must have revived Madam Pomfrey, because a few minutes later, she came in to check on Luke.

“Luke, dear, why are you crying?” she said.

Luke shook his head. “You wouldn't understand. I think I'd like to go to the Great Hall for breakfast today.”

She gave his hand a squeeze. “I can't see any medical reason why not,” she said. “I'll just call Professor Leiman, either he or Hagrid is to accompany you when you're out of the infirmary. For your own protection.”

Luke nodded and sat waiting in the infirmary until Professor Leiman arrived and looked him over. “You look terrible, Luke.”

“I feel terrible, sir,” Luke replied.

\-------------------

The Great Hall was packed full of students, and when Luke walked in, every single one of them fell silent. They turned to watch him, as Professor Leiman escorted him, walk to an empty table and sit down.

Food appeared in front of him, and he ate, mechanically, shovelling the food into his mouth without really stopping to taste it.

The morning's owls flew in and one of them dropped a letter in front of Luke, and then another, and a third.

The first letter was from his mother. Luke didn't think he wanted to open that one right now. The second was from the Ministry of Magic, and the third didn't say where it was from. Professor Leiman grabbed that one and put it into his pocket.

“Luke?”

Luke looked up and very nearly had a heart attack. “Mark!” he exclaimed, perhaps a little too loudly. The whole Great Hall went silent again, and it was very awkward to watch Mark trying to ask Professor Leiman's permission to sit using only gestures. He finally worked out that he had permission and sat down, and talk slowly resumed.

“Mark, what are you doing here? I thought you got dragged off.”

Mark shook his head. “When Mum couldn't find me, Dad came in and started looking for me, and he's the one I learned about the spot I was hiding in from, so he found me. When I explained to him that you're my friend, he argued with Mum about it for a while and he finally convinced her to let me stay. I would've taken my note back, but it was really late. I lost ten points for Hufflepuff anyways, but when Professor Shelly heard about it, she gave five of them back because she said I was being 'a shining example of Hufflepuff values,' and then she started crying and had to go away until she stopped.”

Luke cracked a smile at that. He leaned over and hugged Mark. “Thanks for being a good friend,” he said. “I just wish you weren't the only one.”

Mark grinned. “I'm not. You should've seen what Teddy did! After Potter came in and told us all about you, Professor Leiman came in and said that Potter hadn't had permission to say what he said and that you were no more dangerous than any other student, and then Teddy just about started a riot when he said that Potter oughtn't to have said anything, and he started yelling his head off and asking to see you, and now he's got three weeks detention for bad behavior and swearing.”

“He wanted to come see me?”

“So did I,” Luke said, “And Violet, too, but they wouldn't let any of us in.”

“Violet too? What about Marissa?”

Mark shook his head. “Marissa... I'd avoid Marissa if I were you, mate. She didn't take it too well.”

Luke nodded. “Right. Well, you can't win them all, I guess.”

He looked down at the table, and his letter from the Ministry. He had just started opening it when Teddy Sat down on the other side of him from Mark. “What's up, Luke?”

Luke shrugged. “I've got a letter from the Ministry. I'm guessing it's not good news.”

He pulled the letter out of the envelope, read it over, and sighed heavily. “Well, I might not be expelled.”

“Might not?” Teddy said. “Luke, the way I hear it, you shouldn't be expelled at all.”

Luke shrugged. “Well, the Ministry is going to decide it. Look here,” and he handed the letter over to Teddy.

Dear Luke Restimen,  
It has come to the attention of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement that, on Sunday, February 14, 2010, you performed the Cruciatus Curse on one Hieronymus Runel, a student in residence at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Because you are currently underage, a sentence in Azkaban is not recommended as punishment for this crime, however, you will be charged and brought to trial before the Wizengamot at 9:00 AM, Monday, March 1, 2010, this hearing pursuant to your continuing status as a student at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Until that time, you may remain a student at that school, however, due to the serious nature of your offense, you will remain wandless until and unless you are cleared of wrongdoing in this case.  
Furthermore, due to certain other circumstances in regards to your case specifically, your wand, which has already been confiscated, has been destroyed. Should you be cleared of wrongdoing, you will be reimbursed by the Ministry of Magic for the full value of your wand.  
Any witnesses in your defense, advocates for your cause, and evidence regarding your case, should be present at the Ministry of Magic Court Level for your hearing at or before 9:00 AM, Monday, March 1, 2010.  
Thank you in advance for your cooperation,  
Amos Diggory  
Department of Magical Law Enforcement

Teddy whistled. “You don't see that every day. Do you have an advocate?”

Luke started to shake his head, but Professor Leiman spoke up first. “I'll be present as an advocate for him. For witnesses... well, there's me, and my daughter-in-law, and I expect Professor Flitwick will be willing. Hagrid, of course. With luck, they won't make the charges stick. But I feel it's fair to warn you, Luke—“

“That they'll be listening to politics and they might rule against me?” Luke said.

Professor Leiman nodded. “Yeah. There's already a lot of pressure to just come and arrest you. Full team of aurors, the works. The only reason it hasn't happened is that Potter is on probation for what he did, and that's enough to make the public hesitate. But if they decide that he was right to warn the students... well then I don't think you'll be coming back to Hogwarts.”

Luke nodded. “I understand, sir.”

\-------------------

When Luke walked into his Charms class—Hagrid had delivered him—that morning, he felt very much as though he was lost. Professor Gills looked at him like he was considering kicking him out, and Luke very nearly turned around and left, but Gills gestured for him to sit and that settled the matter. He sat next to Teddy, who seemed to be rather more glum about charms than usual. When it came time to practice casting, Luke didn't have a wand, and felt extremely silly doing nothing. This was only made worse when Gills told him to practice the gestures using a quill, and Luke was reduced to waving a feather at a stack of cushions.

Defense Against the Dark Arts, the next day, went very differently. Professor Shelly brought Luke up to the front of the class and told them all that he was to be trusted implicitly, and then, as though to prove her point, when it was time to practice the spell she was teaching that day, she insisted that Luke borrow her wand. It didn't work very well for him, perhaps because he felt like a team of aurors was about to burst in the door every time he tried to cast a spell, but he felt more like a normal student than he had at any time since the fight.

In Herbology, Professor Longbottom didn't quite seem to know what to make of him anymore, and Professor Orkney just complained about his wandless state. The worst part about the whole affair was that he was forced to sleep in the infirmary, since Hagrid couldn't exactly stand guard over him all night, too.

Defense Against the Dark Arts, the next day, went very differently. Professor Shelly brought Luke up to the front of the class and told them all that he was to be trusted implicitly, and then, as though to prove her point, when it was time to practice the spell she was teaching that day, she insisted that Luke borrow her wand. It didn't work very well for him, perhaps because he felt like a team of aurors was about to burst in the door every time he tried to cast a spell, but he felt more like a normal student than he had at any time since the fight.

Professor Orkney just complained about his wandless state, and in Herbology, Professor Longbottom didn't seem to know what to make of him anymore.  
Luke's friends, too, seemed to be a severely shrunken demographic. Marissa was actively avoiding him, and Violet hadn't spoken to him since he resumed classes.  
Still, he had Mark, and he had Teddy, and that was enough to keep him from sliding into crippling depression (or so he told himself at night).

But eventually, he was going to have to talk to someone other than Mark and Teddy.

“All right, now that the frost flowers have been harvested, very carefully, and without touching them, place them in Linda McTarrens what did I just say?”

Luke grinned as Linda melted her seventh frost flower of the day. It had been slightly amusing at first, but Professor Longbottom's mounting frustration was proving to be overwhelmingly funny.

“You know it's not that funny, right?”

Luke turned at the sound of Marissa's voice. Given that she'd spent the last two days not speaking to him at all, this was, probably, an improvement. “I think it is.”

“Those flowers are worth five galleons a piece. She's destroyed nearly forty galleons of school property.”

Marissa turned away from him, guiding a small bundle of flowers neatly to the bin that Professor Longbottom had indicated.

Mark was already on his third load of the flowers. “Ignore her,” he suggested. “She's just being sour.”

After class was over and the students were all filing out of the greenhouse, though, Luke caught up to Marissa and tapped her on the shoulder. She turned around and glared at him. “What do you want?”

“I wanted to talk.”

“Well, that's too bad,” Marissa said. “I don't have anything to say to you.”

Luke shook his head. “How can you not have anything to say to me?”

For a moment, Luke was afraid that she would, true to her word, say nothing else. Then she did something worse. “Because I hate you,” she said. “You knew what you had inside you, and you kept it secret, you didn't even bother to warn me.”

“Warn you? Why should I warn you? It didn't matter!”

Marissa shook her head. “It matters, Luke. He took over your body! It might not have been for very long, but it happened, and it could happen again at any time!”  
“At any... Marissa, listen to yourself! You sound like Potter!”

“Good!” she yelled. “I'd rather sound like Potter than like Voldemort!” She turned and walked away, robes fluttering behind her.

“Didn't I tell you not to bother?” Mark said from behind Luke.

Luke nodded glumly. “Yeah, but I thought maybe you were wrong. Shows what I know, huh?”

“She really shouldn't be so nasty to you,” Mark said.

Luke shook his head. “She was awake. She saw it happen, saw when I lost control completely. When I... did what I did.”

“You didn't do it, though,” Mark said. “You didn't do any of the things that Voldemort did, and you didn't torture Runel, and...”

“Did I defend my friends? I'm not so sure you can say that it wasn't me, Mark. That other... other soul was doing the things, but they were things that I would have done if I could, right until the end.”

“Yeah, the end, where it completely stopped being something you would do. You know, Luke the Duelling Club should be going tonight. You should go to it.”

The non sequitor was so severe that Luke had to stop and realign his thoughts for a moment before he could figure out why Mark had just said that.

“And do what?” Luke asked when he had finally finished processing this. “Watch everybody else have fun while I'm forced to sit and feel sorry for myself? I haven't got a wand anymore, and I don't think there's anybody who'd be willing to duel me if I did. After all, look what happened the last time I got in a fight.”

Mark shrugged. “I think you might be surprised,” he said. “And I'll lend you my wand; I don't want to get in any duels.”

Luke shook his head. “No. Absolutely not. It's one thing for Professor Shelly to lend me her wand so I can practice calming charms, but if you lend me yours, we're both liable to get arrested.”

Mark shrugged. “Fine. But I'm going to be there, and I know Teddy's going to be there, and I hope I can get some company while I'm watching the duels.”

Luke glared at him. “You can be one manipulative little twerp when you want to be.”

Still, manipulated or not, Luke didn't have anything better to do than to attend the club meeting. Since Professor Leiman was going to be helping with the club, Hagrid went with Luke, providing a big, safe-feeling-inducing bulk to take shelter with. Despite Luke's insistence that he shouldn't, Mark asked Professor Shelly if he could loan Luke his wand, and she told him (to Luke's intense relief) that he couldn't, and the only reason she'd been allowed to lend hers had been because of an obscure law that had been on the books since shortly after Hogwarts was founded. So Luke and Mark sat side by side at a bench, watching the Duelling Club duel, and then, when a few rounds of duelling were through, 

Professor Shelly set off a thunderclap and she had the whole club's attention.

“Now that we're all limbered up,” she said, “I'd like to get to the point of today's meeting. Muggle duelling.” She smiled and looked around the room as puzzled expressions met her eyes. “Yes, muggles have duels, although they call them by different names, usually. There's unarmed duelling, which is usually called sparring, boxing, or wrestling. There is dueling with swords, which is called fencing. And there's duelling with guns, which is actually called duelling and which we will not be doing.” A few of the muggle born students laughed at her joke. “Now, you may be wondering why I've brought this up today. After all, what use is a muggle sport to a wizard? Well, I think I can safely say that I hope it's never any use to any of you. But if you're curious, now is the time to step forward.”

Mark nudged Luke. “You've been plotting this, haven't you, Mark?”

The other boy grinned. “Not me. Professor Shelly talked to me this morning, told me to get you to come to the meeting, and told me that I should know why when it happened. I thought maybe she was going to let you use a borrowed wand, but this is even better. You don't even need a wand.”

Luke sighed. “All right,” he said.

Professor Shelly's indulgence for the curious turned out to be a first year student, by the height of her. Luke couldn't be sure, because they were wearing a fencing outfit. After a quick run-through of the rules, and stressing that these would not be fully regulated matches, but rather a casual exploration of the concept, Professor Shelly waved her wand at each student in turn, and they were swallowed up by fencing outfits. It was a suitably impressive piece of magic, especially when the mask appeared in front of Luke's face without so much as ruffling his hair. Luke was paired up with the first year girl that Professor Shelly had used in her explanation, and he began to have a sneaking suspicion as to the girl's identity.

“Violet?”

She laughed as Luke was handed a foil. “We'll talk later. Right now, I'm gonna whup your butt.”

Luke found that he enjoyed the fencing, although it was quite possibly the sweatiest activity ever devised by mankind. There was something very much like wandwork about it, and he fell into the rhythm of the sport easily. Of course, falling into the rhythm of the thing and being good at it were two different things, and Violet managed to win rather handily several times in a row before Professor Leiman spotted Luke's plight and came over to offer some tips. Luke still lost, but at least it seemed a little closer, and he was happily exhausted by the time it was over.

At the end of the meeting, he only had time to exchange a bit of small talk with Violet before it was time to go. Rather than Professor Leiman or Hagrid, however, Professor Shelly escorted him back to the infirmary.

“So who planned all this?” Luke asked.

Professor Shelly grinned. “Oh, it was Violet. She's a bit nervous about talking to you, since the... the incident. She thinks that the other students might not like her, but... well, I'm afraid I made the mistake of letting her read a few detective stories when she was young, and you know, her father has some strange ideas sometimes. I suppose it only makes sense that she would become a little Machiavellian at times.”

“I'm sorry, but Machiawhat?”

“Sorry,” Professor Shelly said. “I mean that she's a bit prone to... complex schemes. I imagine she'll give up on trying to be secretive in a few days, I wouldn't worry about it.”  
And indeed she did. Saturday morning found Luke, Mark, and Teddy sitting in the infirmary and playing a very strange magical version of Scrabble when the door opened up and 

Violet popped her head in. “Luke?”

He just gestured at a chair and she walked in and took a seat. “Luke,” she said, “I'm sorry, I really should have just come up and talked to you the first time you showed up back at breakfast.”

Luke shook his head. “Don't worry about it. Do you know any way I can use these letters?”

“Hey,” Mark snapped. “No help!”

“You're really okay with it?” Violet said. “I mean, I thought that after you had that big fight with Marissa, that I might be in for some trouble, that you'd be mad at me.”

“Do you think Potter did the right thing?” Luke asked.

“Well, no,” Violet said.

“Then we're fine,” Luke said. “Do you want to take a seat and we can start this game over? Mark's terrible at it, he just goes for the biggest words he can.”

Violet nodded. “Sure.”

Teddy waved at the gameboard, and it put itself away and they restarted their game.

\--------------------

Luke couldn't sleep the night before his hearing. Eventually, he asked Madam Pomfrey to give him a sleeping potion, and she gave him a small dose of the weakest potion she had. It was only just enough, and when Professor Leiman shook him awake in the morning, Luke was still tired.

He looked around the still-dark infirmary (in two weeks, they still hadn't found a better place to put him), and said “Professor Leiman, what time is it?”

“It's six in the morning,” Leiman said. “You've got to look good for this. Professor Flitwick has managed to keep most people thinking you're just an innocent kid, but that doesn't mean this is going to be easy.”

He made Luke shower and put on a set of dress robes that looked far too impressive to be on a child, and then, with a few sharply spoken charms, he cut Luke's hair, tailored his robes, and just generally tidied Luke up.

Luke sat in the infirmary after about an hour of vigorous work, feeling far more well-groomed than any human has a right to feel, and Professor Leiman talked strategy with him. Between having to remember which members of the wizengamot he should and shouldn't make eye contact with, and being drilled on how to tell if someone was trying to slip him veritaserum (Professor Leiman's main criterium for that seemed to be that the suspected potion-slipper was offering a drink), along with a million and one other bizarrely obscure little rules and things he should absolutely avoid saying, Luke was sure he wouldn't remember a lick of it. Finally, at eight, Professor Leiman stood up and announced that it was time to go.

They stepped out into the entrance hall, and found themselves face to face with Mark, Teddy, and Violet.

“Children, you really should be heading for class,” Leiman said.

Mark shook his head. “We want to testify at the hearing,” he said. “All of us.”

Professor Leiman sighed. “Did Shelly put you up to this?”

“No sir,” Teddy said. “But I asked Professor Flitwick about it yesterday, and he said it was a fine idea, and if I could convince you, then he would allow us to come with.”

Leiman stared at the three of them for a moment. His gaze lingered on Teddy for a while.

“Luke,” he said. “Didn't you receive a visit from Mister Lupin here over Christmas?”

“Yes sir,” Luke said. “What does that have to do with—“

“Lupin, come with us. Violet, you have to stay here, I can't bring my own granddaughter as a witness. Jonson, I don't think your testimony will do anything for us that Hagrid can't, and it's important that you stay today, you've been flagging in Potions and I think Professor Slughorn will be good for you.”

Violet and Mark both looked disappointed, but they agreed and headed off to class.

Luke, Teddy, and Professor Leiman headed out of the castle and found a carriage waiting for them. Luke shuddered. It was hooked up to a pair of thestrals.

“Is something wrong, Luke?” Teddy asked.

“I don't like thestrals,” Luke replied.

“You don't like what?”

“Thestrals. The horses.”

“What horses?”

Luke began to get the feeling of being trapped in a comedy sketch. “Those horses,” he said, pointing to the thestrals.

“What horses?” Teddy asked again.

“Luke,” Professor Leiman said, “He can't see them.”

“They're right there!” Luke exclaimed.

“Nevertheless, they are invisible to Mister Lupin,” Professor Leiman said. “You can see thestrals, I would assume, because you witnessed your father's death. They are only visible to those who have seen and understood death. Mister Lupin has not.”

Luke nodded. “Right. Now they're even creepier.”

“Be glad they are not something worse. Thestrals are actually quite gentle and caring. We should stop discussing this, however, and depart, unless you are, perhaps, phobic?”  
Luke shook his head, gritted his teeth, and stepped down to the carriage.

“This carriage,” Professor Leiman said, “Will only be taking us to the edge of the school's wards. I didn't even want to bother with it, but Hagrid seems to think that the thestrals need the exercise, and I cannot help but to be grateful that he's sparing me the task of crossing the grounds on foot, bad leg and all.”

“So, Professor Leiman,” Teddy said, “Have you ever been inside the Ministry of Magic before?”

“Seventeen times,” Professor Leiman said, “Although if anyone asks, I'd prefer for you to say it was only fourteen. I guess your godfather must have taken you to see it a few times?”

“Yes sir,” Teddy said. “It's really cool. They have fireplaces for floo powder, and there's always people apparating in... it's really cool.”

Professor Leiman nodded. “Now, Mister Lupin, I must warn you that, if you do decide to testify, you will almost certainly be speaking against your godfather. Are you—“

“Yes sir,” Teddy said, without hesitating. “What he did was wrong, and he's wrong.”

“Hold onto that conviction, kid. You'll need it.”

Teddy nodded. “Yes sir.”

They passed the outer walls of the grounds after a few minutes of silence, and Professor Leiman stopped the carriage and stepped down to the ground. “Take my hands, boys,” he said. “We'll be collecting Luke's mother first, then I'll be driving us to the Ministry's main entrance.”

“You can drive?” Teddy said. “That's a bit unusual for a wizard.”

“The truth of that statement wounds me,” Professor Leiman said as the boys took his hands, and then, he closed his eyes, stepped forward...

And Luke was dragged through a letterbox. Or at least, that was what it felt like. Every part of his body seemed to be trying to merge with every other part of his body in order to get smaller and closer together. Just when Luke felt certain that something had gone terribly wrong and he wasgoing to suffocate, they emerged into, of all places, a public bathroom. A popping sound, probably a product of their arrival, was still echoing off the walls.

“All right, boys,” Professor Leiman said. “We're currently in the men's room in at King's Cross Station. Our presence here is going unobserved only thanks to the efforts of a small team of wizards, so we'll have to move quickly. In short... get out.”

Luke nodded and walked out of the room, and there, standing outside the door, looking nervous, was his mother.

“Mum!” he shouted.

She turned around. “Oh, Luke, thank goodness! I was beginning to get worried. You know, that letter from Mister Leiman said that he would be arriving via teleportation, and of course, that's not even supposed to be possible, all the scientists say so...”

She trailed off as Professor Leiman and Teddy emerged from the bathroom one after the other.

“Isn't that your friend Teddy?” She asked. “That awful Potter man's godson?”

Luke grinned. It was very easy to tell where Mum's loyalties lay. “Yes, Mum,” he said. “But he's here to testify for me.”

“Oh, good. And you,” she said, stepping over to the professor, “Must be Mister Leiman. So pleased to meet you.”

She stuck out one hand and he shook it smartly. “Likewise. You've raised a fine young man, Missus Restimen.”

She smiled at that. “So, shall we? I have no idea where this Ministry of Magic is, and I rather hope we'll get there in time.”

“Of course we will,” Professor Leiman said. “There's no need to worry about that, ma'am. Even with delays, we have half an hour to get to the Ministry, and it's only fifteen minutes away.”

They left the station and piled into the car, and Professor Leiman drove them to the Ministry. He kept looking over his shoulder for just a fraction of a second as he drove, like he was checking for tails. Old habits, Luke thought, must die hard.

“So,” Annalee said after a few moments of silence, “You teach at Hogwarts, right? My son seems to think very highly of you.”

“Yes ma'am,” Leiman said. “I teach Potions.”

“And you used to do government work?”

“Yes ma'am. It was in the United States, years ago. But I always did enjoy potionmaking, and when I had the chance to teach it, I jumped at it. Of course, that was only this year.”

“And what did you do before that, Mister Leiman?”

Luke sighed. Mum was probing again.

“I was retired for a time. I had moved to England because of certain disagreements with my government, and you can imagine my displeasure when Tom Riddle started wreaking havoc. Of course, I joined forces with the Order of the Phoenix and gathered what information I could for them, but I'm an old man, and I could only be so much use. I really should have started helping sooner, I could probably have saved some lives, at least over Little Whinging... that was what got me to start helping out.” He sighed.

Luke had heard about the battle over Little Whinging. It had been one of the most devastating fights for the Order of the Phoenix.

“Anyways,” Professor Leiman said, “That was how I met Minerva McGonagall. She was teaching at the school then, and I was one of her contacts. After the war was over...” he shrugged. “We got to talking, and one thing led to another, and she offered me the Defense Against the Dark Arts position when she couldn't find another person to take the job. Most people thought the position was still jinxed. I took the job, and it turned out to not be jinxed anymore; I held it for years. But then my daughter-in-law decided that she should try her hand at teaching at Hogwarts, and she's always wanted to teach Defense, and she's good at it, and there was an opening in Potions... well, I took the job.”

“Oh. So you helped to defeat that Voldemort person?”

“I helped to keep it from getting too horrible,” Professor Leiman said. “The people who helped to defeat him were much braver than me.”

That comment left the car in silence for a while. If Professor Leiman thought he was one of the less brave in the war after being a contact for the Order, then Luke was forced to re-evaluate his views of the man. Leiman had had tea with Voldemort once, and described the encounter without batting an eyelash. He acted like he was more concerned about the dragon that he'd had to kill with, the way Luke had interpreted it at least, a hunting rifle. 

“Professor,” Luke said, “You're really brave. You remember that story you told me about the time you had tea with Voldemort, and you stood up to him, and everything?”

“I was young then,” Professor Leiman said, “and very foolish.”

“Wait, Professor Leiman had tea with Voldemort?” Teddy said.

“Yeah, you can ask him about it yourself.”

“The point, boys,” Leiman said forcefully, “is that after that encounter, I was so staggeringly lucky to be alive that I shudder to think of it now. I called him a hateful man. To his face. Had he elected to duel me rather than use a dragon to achieve his ends, he would have ended me, whether I was able to eliminate him or not. He was the most dangerous man I have ever met, all the more so for his insanity.”

“But you had tea with him and survived!” Teddy said.

“So did Lucius Malfoy, many times more than I,” Leiman pointed out. “Would you say that he was the bravest soul in the war?”

That seemed to throw Teddy for a loop.

“You certainly are an interesting man, Mister Leiman,” Annalee said.

“Really, ma'am? If you think I'm noteworthy enough to be interesting, then my skills are clearly getting rusty. Perhaps I should sink into anonymity this summer, take a chance to practice.”

Luke wasn't quite sure how he should take that, but something told him that “literally” wasn't really a bad option there.

“We're here,” Professor Leiman said after a few minutes, stopping the car in front of a largeish, rather ugly brick building with big glass windows, which looked in on empty space. A rusty sign out front declared a sale on “Ens ear”, which Luke surmised might once have read “menswear”, but now only declared that the building was long abandoned.

“Um, Mister Leiman?” Annalee said. “Are you certain we're in the right place?”

“Absolutely,” Professor Leiman said. “Everybody out.”

They all got out of the car, and the professor led them towards the building. He looked around to make sure nobody was watching, and then nodded briskly. “Right. Hold your breath, and follow me.”

And with that, he stepped through the old glass storefront.

Luke shrugged. “You get used to these sorts of things, Mum.”

“I should hope so,” she said, and then she plunged forward, too, taking a deep breath. Teddy went next, and finally, Luke plunged through. For just a moment, he felt the resistance of the glass, and then it seemed to break up into a liquid, though it left his skin dry, and then smoke—Luke had a feeling that inhaling the smoke would have been unpleasant—and then, as he walked forward, the smoke vanished and he emerged into a vast chamber. Luke found himself standing in a wide atrium, with a brightly polished wooden floor underneath his feet. Witches and wizards in multicolored robes were bustling about everywhere, and the ceiling flashed bright golden symbols that seemed to have some meaning, though what that might be was beyond him. Down at the other end of the atrium was a statue of a thin wizard in tremendously dorky glasses, but it was quite a distance away, so it wasn't until Luke was closer that he realized that the statue was, in fact, of Harry Potter.

“Oh no,” Luke mumbled. “I am totally screwed.”

Professor Leiman led them to a desk where a very bored-looking wizard in a red robe was sitting. He perked up at their approach and peered quizzically at them, although mostly he seemed to be evaluating Professor Leiman and Luke's mum, who were both wearing nice muggle clothing rather than robes. At least, he was until he caught sight of Luke, and his eyes went wide.

He kept a very close eye on Luke as he questioned Professor Leiman about his purpose at the Ministry of Magic and the names and nature of his guest, and then he pulled some round objects out from underneath his desk and handed them to the visitors. When he got to Luke, Luke smiled and said cheerfully, “Just remember, Mister, garlic is for vampires, silver is for werewolves, but nothing protects against small children. Oh, and next time you want to stare at someone, either be more discreet or go all out and make scene, please.”

“Luke,” Annalee snapped. “Can you not at least be polite when you're on trial? Please?”

“Only if they are,” Luke said irritably.

Professor Leiman was laughing. “It's better that he get it out now, when what he says can't affect the trial yet. We'll be before the entire Wizengamot, so we'll have to go to level ten. The elevators don't go there. Stick with me.”

He led them to a bank of lifts with golden doors, appropriated one—nobody else seemed to want to get in with them, Luke noticed—and thumbed the button for level nine.

To Luke's surprise, the lift lurched and started to go down, rather than up. Even more surprisingly, it only went down one floor, and a soft, feminine voice said, “Level nine, Department of Mysteries.”

The lift door opened up to reveal a number of witches and wizards, some of whom balked at the sight of Luke. Luke waved jauntily at them as he passed, but he didn't have time to say anything snippy to them, as Professor Leiman was setting a very brisk pace. He led them down a staircase into a dimly lit corridor. There were torches on the walls to provide light, and a number of people clustered at the end of the corridor. One of them was very tall.

“Is that Hagrid?” Luke asked.

“Yes, it is,” Professor Leiman said. “He'll be speaking on your behalf.”

Introductions were made for the benefit of Luke's mother, who would be testifying, and then they all sort of stood around awkwardly for a while until a big oak door in the wall opened up and someone called for “The Accused.”

Professor Leiman led Luke through the door, which had a big number ten on it. Luke found himself in a cold room made mostly of the same grey stone as the corridor outside, but much, much larger. He was in a pit in the center of what was, effectively, an amphitheater. A single chair sat in the middle of the floor. There were chains dangling from the arms of the chair. Beyond the walls of the pit, seated in the amphitheater's seats, were several dozen witches and wizards, all in very dark blue robes with a bright silver “W” embroidered on the chest. A panel of four was seated right at the edge of the pit, all of whom were wearing unlettered robes.

A tall man with a very serious look on his face intoned grimly, “Take your seat, Mister Restimen.”

Luke sat in the chair, and, after a few moments, the tall man stood up and announced, “Let these proceedings begin. Luke Dennis Restimen, you stand accused of the use of the Cruciatus curse on a fellow human being. Your guilt in this matter is dependant upon the circumstances under which the event occurred, and not whether the event occurred at all. Due to the very special nature of your case, in relation to your unique link with Tom Riddle, the entire Wizengamot is present for your trial. Here to preside over this meeting are myself, Kingsley Joseph Shacklebolt, Senior Undersecratary Hermione Jean Weasley, and Amos Percival Diggory, Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. Who speaks for the accused?”

Professor Leiman stood forward. “That would be me, Minister. Colonel James Henry Leiman.”

“Very well.” Shacklebolt sat down, nodded. “We will begin by reviewing the events of February the fourteenth, two-thousand and ten...”

And so began the questions. Luke was first asked to describe what had happened during the fight with Runel, and then he was asked to go over the details that some members of the Wizengamot had missed, and then he was asked to go over his perception of the events, and then he was asked to tell the story one more time, and just when he thought it might be a time to start going mad, the trial moved on.

“Now that we have firmly established the events of the day in question,” Shacklebolt said, “We will begin examining the reasons why they occurred. The court recognizes Harry James Potter.”

And with that, the door that Luke had come in through opened up, and Potter walked in. The feeling of fear that had been festering in Luke's gut intensified, and Luke had to make an effort to not shy away.

Potter cleared his throat, looked around. His eyes rested on Luke for an unusually long time.

“Mister Potter,” Shacklebolt said, “Please tell us what you know about the accused.”

Potter nodded, closed his eyes for a moment, and then started speaking. “I first met the accused at the beginning of this school year, on September first. He had been sorted into Slytherin house at Hogwarts, but the Sorting Hat had made some interesting comments during his sorting. As it turns out, the Hat recognized Mister Restimen in some way. It said that it had already sorted him, seventy-one years previously, in the same year that it sorted Tom Riddle. I was called to the school after Mister Restimen was sorted in order to try and determine if he had anything to do with Riddle.

“I attempted to determine via legilimency if he was inhabited by the spirit of Riddle but I couldn't tell for sure, since I am not a very strong legilimens. Professor James Leiman was asked to help, and he determined, through legilimency, that Mister Restimen harbors a fragment of Riddle's soul. We decided that this was probably the same fragment that had rested in my body until May second of nineteen-ninety-eight.”

“I'm sorry,” Shacklebolt said, “When you say 'we,' you are referring to...”

“Myself, Professor James Leiman, Minerva McGonagall, Professor Filius Flitwick, and the heads of house at Hogwarts.

“After we determined that it was probably Riddle's soul that was trapped in the boy, I decided that I should keep an eye on him, and asked Professor Kevin Gills, head of the Slytherin house, to assist me in this, as well as Rubeus Hagrid, with whom I was on good terms. They reported to me on Mister Restimen's actions, helping to fill in details left out in Professor Flitwick's reports. It wasn't long before the boy began to investigate Riddle's life, and even began to ask certain people to compare him to Riddle.

“I believe that this shows that he's being influenced by the fragment of Riddle's soul that he carries. When I heard about the incident on the fourteenth, I was shocked and appalled, but I can't say I was surprised. As soon as I heard that Restimen was researching Riddle's life in depth, I suggested that he be expelled from the school as he could easily become dangerous to the other students, or worse, become the third incarnation of Voldemort that England would have to deal with. The Hogwarts staff declined, obviously, and just as I had predicted, Restimen's mental blocks broke and he attacked another student. Tragedy was only prevented by the timely arrival of a member of the staff.

“I believe, obviously, that Luke Restimen is too dangerous to be allowed to learn magic.”

Professor Leiman stepped forward. “Well said, Harry. Now, I have a question for you.”

Potter raised an eyebrow. “Go ahead.”

“Why didn't you mention your visit to Luke's home over the Christmas break?”

Potter seemed almost to stumble over the question. “I beg your pardon?”

“On December... I believe it was the twenty-third, you visited Luke's home and spoke at length with his mother.”

Potter nodded. “Oh, yes. Well, that's hardly relevant. My godson, Teddy Lupin, was a friend of Restimen's and, being sometimes absentminded, had forgotten to buy a gift for his friend until quite late. I offered to take him to Restimen's house to deliver the gift in person.”

“Ah,” Leiman said. “And when, during this time, did you obliviate your godson?”

“Oh, well that was—I beg your pardon!”

Leiman was grinning now. The look in his eyes reminded Luke of a wolf he'd seen in a zoo once. He might have been facing down a disarmed enemy rather than The Boy Who Lived, and seemed not at all perturbed by the murmuring that had started at his question. “It's a simple enough question. You see, I happen to know that Luke was quite vocal about his dislike of you, and, though I'm terribly sorry to have to be the one to tell you this, it seems that your efforts at clandestine monitoring weren't subtle enough to escape the notice of an eleven-year-old boy; he thought you were having him watched. He'd made all this very clear to his friends, including Teddy Lupin. Although I must admit that Teddy Lupin is not the brightest of my students, he is certainly sensitive enough to the wishes of his friends that he would rather have sent his gift via owl, and it would have arrived on time, than bring a man who his friend was clearly—no, expressly—afraid of, who his friend believed was having him watched, into that friend's home. When, Mister Potter, did you obliviate your godson?”

Potter stammered for a moment and Professor Leiman smiled. “Well?”

“You have no proof of this,” Potter said. “It sounds like some kind of a crackpot theory to me.”

“We have veritaserum available to us, Potter,” Professor Leiman said. “And I happen to know that, in the defense of an accused prisoner, I can force you to take it if I believe you are concealing relevant information. Tell me the truth, because it will come out either way.”

“How is this even relevant?” Potter snapped.

“I'm afraid I share that question, Mister Leiman,” the bushy-haired witch next to Shacklebolt—Hermione Granger, Luke supposed—piped up.

“It demonstrates that Potter was in a state of extreme paranoia, brought on by the specter of Tom Riddle's return. His willingness to obliviate a child—his own godson, no less—is evidence that his opinion of Luke was already extremely warped. At that point, Luke had not even begun to show the level of curiousity about Riddle that fueled Potter's fears in the first place.”

There was whispering among the Wizengamot, for several very long minutes, and Potter spent every moment of that time glaring at Leiman, who was bouncing cheerfully back and forth on his heels. For all Potter's efforts to stare holes in the professor, Leiman seemed to be immune to his glare.

Finally, Shacklebolt stood and said “It is the decision of this court that Harry Potter may be made to take veritaserum.”

Potter shook his head. “Now wait just a second—“

“Potter,” Shacklebolt said, “The dose administered will be small, and you will not be harmed. However, you must accept this.”

Potter tensed up, looking like he was trying to decide whether he should hurt Professor Leiman, and how badly, and then Leiman said, calmly, “Unless you have something to say, Mister Potter?”

Potter sighed. Obviously, he was defeated. “All right, yes. I obliviated Teddy.” The entire courtroom, as a body, gasped, even Luke. Only Professor Leiman seemed unaffected. 

He just smiled. “When?”

“When I discovered that he had forgotten to get his friend a gift, I offered to take him to deliver it directly. He refused, and I obliviated him to make him remember deciding differently. I felt that it was my duty to investigate Restimen further. I'll admit that it was the wrong thing to do, and I lost a lot of sleep over it, but my opinion of Restimen remains unchanged. He is dangerous.”

There was a long silence, and then Professor Leiman said, “Were you dangerous, Potter? When you were at school, were you dangerous because of your link with Riddle?”

“That is a different case entirely, and besides, the question is not whether or not Riddle can take over his body, that's been answered, it happened!”

“And therefore Luke doesn't deserve the same advantages you had? I seem to recall there were several cases in your fifth year when you experienced a vivid link to Riddle's mind and even believed you had been possessed by him, but you did not ask to be expelled. You did not believe you were too dangerous to learn magic. In nineteen-ninety-eight, you actively used that same link to monitor Riddle's activities. Were you too dangerous then? Was Riddle's influence making you too dangerous?”

“YES, it was! And then, Riddle had a body, and didn't need mine, and yet I was dangerous to be around because of my link to him! He could have used me to kill my friends had he chosen to!”

“Calm down, Potter,” Leiman said. “I have more questions, and I would rather ask them of someone who isn't shouting. If you had been under the supervision of powerful wizards and witches, and had lost control to Riddle, do you think that there would have been too great a problem?”

Potter sighed. “Yes. I do.”

“Do you think that that, alone would have been reason to expel you?”

Potter was silent for a long, long time.

“I see,” Leiman said at last. “And Mister Potter, are you a dark wizard?”

Potter stared at him. “What?”

“Are you a dark wizard? An evil lord of foul magic, the head of a legion of minions more bloodthirsty than the Huns and more twisted than the Dark Lord himself?”

“No!” Potter shouted.

Leiman raised an eyebrow. “Huh. Not an evil wizard, despite the fact that you had a direct link to the mind of Tom Riddle at the height of his power, even though you carried a fragment of his soul in you body and wore his horcrux around your neck on a regular basis for months. How interesting. Tell me, Harry, are you a good man?”

“I like to think so, yes,” Potter said.

“Then what makes you think Luke Restimen won't be?”

\-------------------------

“This court recognizes Rubeus Archibald Hagrid,” Shacklebolt said as the great oak door opened again and admitted the towering form of Hagrid.

Hagrid trudged over next to Luke. “Hullo, Luke,” he said.

Luke waved meekly up at him.

After the various rigamarole of getting Hagrid's arrival on record, Professor Leiman nodded sharply and began his questions. “Mister Hagrid, tell me about Tom Riddle.”

Hagrid pursed his lips. “Well, sir, Tom Riddle was a nasty piece o' work if ever I saw one. He had what you might call strong opinions on the subject o' blood purity. He was known to lie, an' he didn' ever feel the least bit o' guilt abou' killin' someone. I didn' know him very well, you know, but he an' I had a few brushes with each other, an' none of 'em were pleasant.”

Leiman nodded. “Right. On that subject. Until about five years ago, you were not permitted to do magic, is that correct?”

“Yes sir,” Hagrid said.

“Could you tell us who is to blame for that, in your opinion?”

“Oh, well, You-Know-Who is, sir.”

Leiman smiled. “I'm sorry, could you be specific. Do you mean that Tom Riddle is to blame?”

Hagrid turned bright red. “Um, yes sir.”

“Why?”

“Well, he's the one who told Armando Dippet that I was the heir o' Slytherin. He said that I'd unleashed Slytherin's monster. O' course, at the time I was raisin' an acromantula I'd hatched from an egg, which qualified well enough fer Professor Dippet, an' I was expelled. As soon as that happened, the attacks stopped—there'd been attacks at Hogwarts, y'see, that was why it was important—so the blame stuck with me. It turned out that You-Know... er, that Riddle was the real Heir o' Slytherin, an' he'd been unleashin' the monster, which wasn' even an acromantula, it was a basilisk. He'd pinned the attacks on me, to cover fer himself.”

Leiman nodded. “All right. Thank you. Now, would you please tell me about Luke Restimen?”

Hagrid nodded. “Well, Luke isn' like that at all, sir. He's smart, which I suppose Riddle was, but he's very honest, as well. He's a muggle-born, an' he thinks that blood purity don' mean a thing excep' who yer parents were. He helps out the other students at school. He's 'specially taken a likin' ter Mark Jonson. Jonson's a Hufflepuff, very shy boy, not too good with magic, not the type Riddle woulda bothered with. Luke hangs abou' with four friends most o' the time, an' they're all from differen' houses. It's got so the other students even call 'em things like the League o' Interhouse Friendliness or somethin' like that, on accoun' o' how they're all from different houses. They stick together.”

Luke stared at the ground as Hagrid started talking about his friends. He was suddenly missing Marissa quite a bit.

“Thank you, Mister Hagrid,” Leiman said. “If the court has any questions for Mister Hagrid?”

“I do have one,” Shacklebolt said. “Mister Hagrid, what do you think of Luke's interest in the life of Tom Riddle?”

“Oh, well that's easy enough ter figure out,” Hagrid said. “He knows he's got a part o' Riddle's soul in him, so naturally he's curious. He's talked ter me a few times abou' it, an' even asked me if I think he's like Riddle. He didn't ask like he was hopin' I'd say yes, though. He seemed more scared o' that than anythin' else. I think he's tryin' ter be as different from   
Riddle as he can. He doesn' want ter follow in Riddle's footsteps, y'see.”

Shacklebolt nodded. “Yes, I see. Thank you for your time, Mister Hagrid.” He sent Hagrid out of the courtroom and then stood up and said, “Now, this court recognizes Theodore Remus Lupin.”

The door opened again, and Teddy walked in. He looked as though he had been crying, and Luke realized that Teddy must have just heard about Potter's betrayal. He looked away, but he felt a hand on his shoulder a moment later and looked up to see Teddy smiling down at him. “It's all right, I'll get over it,” Teddy said.

Once the proceedings of the court were dispensed with, Professor Leiman immediately began grilling Teddy.

“Teddy, can you, perhaps, tell the court an amusing anecdote about Luke? Preferably one that tells us what he's usually like?”

Teddy nodded. “All right. Sure. Um... all right, so we were just getting out of Charms class when Pam Patil—she's a Ravenclaw—dropped her books, and everybody started laughing at her, but Luke just started helping her pick them up, and then Hieronymus Runel, one of the Slytherins—he's kind of a bully—cast some kind of a jinx on her, that is, on Patil's Charms textbook, and it exploded. She started crying, but Luke just helped her to pick up all the pages that went everywhere, and he helped her to fix it, but she was still crying, so he grabbed her by the hand and ran with her until they caught up with Runel, but they managed to sneak up on him, and Luke cast a permanent sticking charm on the bottom of Runel's shoe, just to make Pam laugh.”

The courtroom rang with laughter. It wasn't exactly a very original trick to pull—Luke had fallen victim to it earlier the same day—but it was still a very amusing one.

“Thank you,” Professor Leiman said. “That certainly helped to lighten the mood in here. Now, Teddy, would you say that Luke is a mean person? Did he do that to Mister Runel because he wanted to laugh at Runel's misfortune?”

Teddy shook his head. “No, he didn't. Actually, he's always telling me and Mark to not go after Runel, even though he's such a bully. He says we shouldn't go attacking him, because then we'd just be bullying him back.”

“And does he let Runel bully you, then?”

Teddy shook his head. “Heck no. That's what this whole thing is about, even. The fight where he lost control was because he was trying to help us. Runel had got together a whole bunch of friends and come around to start teasing us. He called Mark a squib, and Mark really hates to be called a squib, and he kinda went nuts and attacked Runel, so Runel stunned him, but he did it with a spell that hurts a lot, too. So after that, the rest of us tried to stand up to him but there were too many of his friends there. Luke got back too late to help out—he'd been in the bathroom—and then the fight happened.”

Leiman nodded. “Tell me, Teddy. Do you think the fight would have happened at all if Luke had been there when Runel showed up?”

Teddy shook his head. “No. Luke would've kept Mark from attacking Runel.”

“And if Mark had done it anyways?”

“Luke would've stunned him to stop him if he had to. He'll fight if he has to, but if there's a way he can keep from getting in a fight, he'll take it.”

Professor Leiman gave a sage little nod at that. “One more question, Teddy. What did you do when Harry Potter told everyone that Luke had a piece of Tom Riddle's soul attached to him?”

Teddy grinned. “I got really angry. I didn't even believe it at first, but then, when I found out that it was still supposed to be a secret, and he hadn't been told to tell us, I tried to go and see Luke right away to tell him that I was still going to be his friend, and it didn't matter. I think I must've got a little carried away though. I, uh... I still have another week of detention left.”

“You got detention because of how much you protested what Potter had done?”

"Yes sir,” Teddy said, proudly.

Professor Leiman nodded. “Thank you, Teddy. That will be all.”

\----------------------

It was a long time before Luke was called back into the courtroom to hear the court's decision. Several hours, at least, spent waiting, with his mother next to him, reassuring him that it would be okay, came to an abrupt end as the court's scribe poked his head out of the big oak door and said, “Luke Restimen, James Leiman, please step into the courtroom. The Wizengamot is ready to deliver its decision.”

They went back into the courtroom and Luke took a seat in the chair with the chains. Kingsley Shacklebolt stood up.

“For the crime of performing the Cruciatus Curse on a fellow human being,” he proclaimed in a dark voice, “This court decrees that Tom Marvolo Riddle is to be expelled from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.” Luke's heart skipped a beat. “Unfortunately,” Shacklebolt continued, “this sentence is delivered posthumously, and there is no way to carry it out. Luke Dennis Restimen, this court finds you to be innocent of wrongdoing in this case. Furthermore, it is the decision of this court that you are not to be expelled from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. You will have the value of your wand reimbursed by the Ministry of Magic, with apologies made for its destruction and for any inconvenience associated with such.” Shacklebolt smiled. “Thank you, and you may go.”

“Well,” Teddy said as Luke stepped out of the courtroom. “What did they say?”

“They said I could stay in school,” Luke said.

“I told you you'd be fine,” his mother said, although the way she said it seemed to indicate that she'd been less than confident.

Professor Leiman was grinning broadly as he stepped out into the corridor. “We did all right,” he said. “Of course, now, young man, you need a wand.”

\----------------------

“Well, I usually don't see people back in here so soon after the first time, but I'm sure I can find something quicker this time around.” Joy Dallas winked at Luke as she pulled a wand out from under the counter. “In fact, I've been pondering what to do about finding a suitable wand for you ever since the stories about you came out in the newspaper. Try this one out.”

Luke took the wand out of her hand and immediately shook his head. “No. It won't work. Just a stick for me, I'm afraid.”

Joy nodded. “Right. I was afraid of that. I don't suppose you'd consider a more exotic option? Staffs are really very in vogue in India right now.”

Luke grinned and glanced over at Professor Leiman. He had a feeling he knew where the man's cane came from. “I think I'd prefer a wand, if it's all the same to you. Aren't staffs more expensive, anyways?”

Joy nodded. “Yes, they are, but they're well worth it. I suppose I'll try for a wand, though. You can always get a staff in a couple of years. Use it for duelling, you know.” She pulled her own wand out of the recesses of her dress and nodded smartly. “Accio,” she snapped, and a wand box zipped to her hand. “Here. Try this one.”

She pulled a wand out of the box and handed it to Luke. The look of it was odd, very light-colored, with an extremely long grain to the wood, and one part where the lines all stopped and bunched together into a black band around the wand, and then the pattern resumed on the other side. Luke took the wand, and felt a warm feeling flowing up his arm from his fingertips. He gave it a swing, and bright blue sparks cascaded from the end.

“That's the one,” Joy said.

“What's it made of?” Luke asked. “It's really light.”

“Oh, yeah,” Joy said. “That one is bamboo. Fourteen inches exactly, with a dual core. One unicorn tail hair, one witch's hair. One of mine, actually.”

Luke grinned. “Mister Westcott would have a fit.”

“I do believe he would,” Joy said. “That's the sign of a wand well done, if you ask me.”

“It absolutely is, Joy,” Professor Leiman said as he handed over the money for the wand. “Thank you for the help.”

Joy flashed him a magazine-cover smile. “Anytime, Eye Candy.”

Leiman sighed. “Joy, I am seventy-four years old.”

She just kept right on grinning. “And I'm a hundred and seven. You're still a strapping young man, and you will be for at least another couple of decades. You're a wizard, wizards keep well. Now go on and get out of my shop, I want to watch you leave.”

Professor Leiman sighed, but he turned around and left the shop anyways.

“So,” Luke said as they headed for Hogwarts, “Just out of curiosity, when you left America, did you take everyone you knew with you?”

Leiman smiled indulgently. “No. She's here because of Ollivander. The old man decided it would be a good idea to bring her over to collaborate on some pet project he had going. I expect he had a heart attack just to get away from her.” He held out his hand to Luke, and Luke took it, and then they went through the letterbox again and arrived at the gates of Hogwarts, ready to go back.

\------------------------

Two days later, Marissa finally came around. She'd been eating alone since Violet decided to start eating lunch with Luke, Mark, and Teddy, and it had been really difficult for Luke to watch. At breakfast, though, she sat down at their table. Teddy glared at her.

“What are you doing here?”

She shook her head. “I'm sorry, all right. I just want to say I'm sorry.”

Luke grinned. “You do?”

She nodded, gave him a look like she was trying to decide whether or not to get up and walk away. “I want to apologize. I acted like a jerk to you, and you were just trying to protect me and you lost control.”

Luke nodded. “I'm sorry, Marissa,” he said. “I think... I think I must have scared you pretty bad when I attacked Runel.”

She nodded. “Yeah, you did.”

Teddy, however, didn't seem so ready to forgive. “What changed you mind?” he said. “Was it the fact that everybody else is doing it?”

“No!” Marissa shouted. “I felt really rotten, that's all. And... and I was talking to Professor Leiman about it, and he said maybe I should just go and talk to Luke. “

"Teddy,” Luke said, “Drop it. They call us the League of Interhouse Friendship, not the Bickering Confederation.”

“She's a traitor!” Teddy exclaimed.

“She's a friend,” Luke said. “Now drop it. If I'm willing to take her back, you should be too. Of course, I think there may be someone else she has to convince, too.”

Marissa stared at Luke for a moment. “Who?”

Luke grinned.

\-------------------------

Luke knocked on the door of Hagrid's hut and waited. The walk over had been messy. March was making itself known, and doing so in the very expressive medium of mud. Beside him, Marissa was shaking the mud off her shoes. “You could have told me it was going to be ankle-deep muck.”

Luke shrugged. “I didn't know. I haven't got the chance to get out here until this afternoon.”

“Are you sure he's even here?”

Luke shook his head and knocked again.

“Hey, what are you doin' there?”

“No,” Luke said. “He's not in the hut.” Luke turned around and waved to Hagrid. The big man was carrying a bundle of cloth from the general direction of the Forbidden Forest, and Charlie Weasley was trailing after him. “Hello, Hagrid!”

“Oh. It's you. I thought someone might be messin' with my hut. It wouldn' be the firs' time.” Hagrid trundled up to the door and pulled it open, then peered at Marissa. “Say, aren' you that Jones girl?”

She nodded. “Yes sir,” she said in a very small voice.

“Makin' nice with Luke now, are you?”

She nodded. “I was being a jerk to him before.”

“You absolutely were,” Hagrid said. “He talked ter me abou' you. He was very upset about the way you treated him, you know.”

Marissa nodded. “I know, sir.”

Hagrid stared at her for a second, like he was trying to decide what to do about something on the bottom of his shoe, and then he shrugged. “Ah, well. You migh' as well come in.” They all went into the hut, and Hagrid started making tea. “So, when did you two make yer peace?”

Luke laughed. “This morning, at breakfast. She finally gave up and came over to talk to us. Teddy almost ripped her head off, but I told him to back off, and he did.”

“Well, that's good,” Hagrid said. “You know, he can be a little hot under the collar sometimes. Oh, I made some scones, by the way, help yerselves.”

The scones had been sitting in the center of the table, looking far more edible than they actually were. Luke just smiled and nodded. “Thanks, Hagrid.”

Marissa made the mistake of grabbing one and trying to bite into it. She winced.

“Anyway,” Hagrid said as he sat down at the table, “It's good ter see yer puttin' aside yer differences. You all right, Marissa?”

Marissa nodded. “Yeah, just.. I think I must have bit my lip.”

Hagrid nodded. “Oh yeah. Hate it when that happens.”

The tea kettle started whistling a few moments later and Hagrid poured them each a cup of tea.

“To friends,” Hagrid said as he lifted his cup.

“To friends,” Luke said.

“To friends,” Marissa added her own voice, and they all sipped their tea, and talked about the trial, and Professor Leiman's defense, and magical creatures, and wands, and anything they could think of to talk about, until it was time for Luke to start heading back to the castle.

“We'll have to do this again sometime,” Luke said.

Hagrid nodded. “Yeah, we will. It was nice ter meet ya, Marissa.”

She smiled at the big man and they left for the castle.

“So why do you do duelling club?” Marissa asked after a while.

Luke shrugged. “I don't know. It's fun. Professor Shelly comes up with all sorts of new ideas to keep us entertained. It's like chess, only with your whole body.”

“Really? So you don't just do it because you have fun fighting?”

“Nah,” Luke said. “I don't even duel with people I'd want to fight, like a real fight. Just with Violet, and with Teddy.”

Marissa grinned. “Just with your friends.”

“Yeah,” Luke said. “Just with my friends.”

“Would you duel with me?” Marissa asked.

Luke nodded. “Of course I would. I bet you'd be really fun to duel with.”

Marissa smiled. “All right. Well, I'm still not joining the club, but I'm glad you'd duel with me if I did.” And with that, she leaned over and kissed him very gently on the lips, then opened the doors of the castle and slipped inside. Luke stood there for a moment, feeling very much as though he wanted to do something, but he simply couldn't think of what it would be. A first kiss—and that, not the peck on the cheek in the common room on Valentines, had been the first in his opinion—should really seem like more, but that had just felt like what should happen. He shrugged and headed off to Duelling Club.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's the first part of this series done. There are two more parts currently in existence, and after that, November will bring us part four, then every November will bring a new one until part seven is done.


End file.
